{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017953321364452424, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01615798922800718, 'mean_word_length': 4.8994708994708995, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Analysing headlines as a way of downsizing news corpora: Evidence from an Arabic-English comparable corpus of newspaper articles


 This study examines whether a qualitative analysis of news headlines produces complementary, convergent, or dissonant findings with a quantitative analysis of the full news story. Headlines are among the most important parts of a news story and its summary. This study investigates the construction of Qaddafi in the headlines of two newspapers before and during the 2011 Libyan civil war. This is based on a sub-corpus of headlines that was taken from a 6.5-million-word corpus of two newspapers; one published in English; The Guardian, and the other in Arabic; Asharq Al-Awsat from 2009 to 2011. The analysis of the headlines has produced complementary and convergent findings with the corpus analysis and suggests that the 2011 Libyan civil war represents a turning point on how Qaddafi is represented in the investigated newspapers. This study concludes that analysing headlines proves to be a good down-sampling option to reduce large news corpora to a workable amount of data.