INTRODUCTION
Information extraction is the task of extracting relevant information from unstructured. This
chapter aims to ‘mine’ (or extract) crime information from online newspaper articles and make
this information available to the public. So this chapter focuses on automatic extraction of public
yet ‘hidden ‘information available in newspaper articles and make it available to the general
public and it demonstrates how crimes related information can be extracted from newspapers .
With the advent of the internet, a huge volumes of data (also called big data) are available online.
Electronic newspapers are increasingly being read by users from anywhere, anytime. In New
Zealand alone there are about 20 daily newspapers, and many of them make an electronic version
available online. Newspapers are a source of authentic and timely information. There is a large
amount of information available in newspaper articles. For example, newspaper articles contain
information about crimes, accidents, politics, cultural events and sports events. Even though
valuable information is available in human-readable form is online newspapers and electronic
archives, software systems that can extract relevant information and present these information
are scarce and this has been of significant interest to researchers in the field of Information
Extraction (Cowrie and Lehnert 1996)Currently ,this information is not readily available for
users,but these can be obtained from newspaper articles of a particular region, as they tend to
report the important crimes. In certain countries, crime information is available to the public on
top of google maps .For example UK government has crime map( UK Police 2013) available to
the public
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
This section it provides an overview of the related work in the domain of crime extraction. Crime
monitoring and prevention is a domain of interest to all countries across the globe in order to
make the world a safer place to live. Use of ICT technologies for this purpose has been around
since the advent of computers .Currently, with massive amounts of data being available on an
individual activities (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) and the wide spread availability of news articles
(e.g. Through freely available online newspapers and YouTube), researches have become
interested in combining these information to monitor and prevent crimes. While an individual’s
activities can be private, most newspaper articles are public. In this chapter we consider such
publicly available information. Also the focus of this work is to identify crime locations, the type
of the crime and make this available to the public. This information can potentially be used in
crime prevention. Researchers working in the area of crime information extraction have used
several techniques such as crowd sourcing, data mining and machine learning for this purpose.
The Wiki Crimes project (Wiki Crimes 2013, Furtado et al.2010) harnesses the power of the
crowd where individuals report crime details online and other users can use this information to
make decisions. However, a limitation of this approach is the difficulty of verifying the
authenticity of the posted crimes.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Crime has impeded the development of the state .Crime offences in the state have done the state
more harm than good .Criminality has taken a new dimension ,crimes are being committed in a
more sophisticated manner, and criminals have devised ways of evading the watchful eyes of the
security eyes of the security operatives and general citizens. There is also a major concern to
know if crime is age and gender related. That is, do people within certain age bracket commit
more crime than others and does a particular gender engage in criminal activities than the other.
There is equally another concern of knowing the level of crime, are the security operatives doing
a good job? Have government being committed to positively employing our youths?
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
Classification of articles and fetch articles from online newpaper.
Predict crimes using previous trends.
Grouping crime by clustering.
Visualizing data using location heat maps and scale maps.
JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY
SCOPE OF THE STUDY
This study is centered on the stastical analysis of the crime offenses recorded in newspaper
articles .Another scope of the study is to know if crime is age and gender related. Thirdly, to
know the frequently committed crimes in certain areas.
LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
It is necessary to mention some of the research of the limitations in this research work.
The chief limitation is first, the relationship between different sentences have not been
explored. For example, the crime details may be in the first sentence and the location
details can be in the fifth sentence of the same paragraph or even in the subsequent
paragraph.
Also how to eliminating the duplicate articles reporting the same crime within a
newspaper for( example elaborate news may follow brief news items)