Mining the Stream of News for City Areas Profiling: A Case Study for the City of Rome

Tracking and profiling changes in the occurrence of notable events in a city, in terms of what happens in the different areas and how possible changes are perceived, is an important issue in the context of smart cities: in fact, it may be helpful in developing applications to help administrations and citizens alike. In this paper, we propose an approach to provide time-sensitive snapshots of events within the different areas of a city, and the city as a whole. To probe inside neighborhoods and communities, we propose to use articles in online newspapers, as they represent an accessible source of information on what notable events actually happen, and on the most relevant topics at a given moment in time. We adopt an approach to group up articles by means of clustering, and to automatically assign labels to clusters by analyzing their content. The outcomes of this procedure, repeated along a certain timespan, are able to describe the temporal evolution of notable events in specific city areas. In this paper we show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology by reporting a case study for the city of Rome, over an investigation span of few years, which includes also the Covid-19 pandemic period.