From media reporting to international relations: a case study of asia-pacific economic cooperation (apec).

Network analysis has brought new perspectives in studying emergent structure in international relations. Prior work on networks of international relations has mostly relied on data derived from formal alliances and trade flows, which can hardly capture the rapidly evolving international relations due to globalization and recent advances in information technology. In this work, we propose a novel research design that aims at capturing ``real-time'' international relations through news reporting. We collect worldwide news on a daily basis, and characterize the relationship between any two countries through analyzing the similarity of their news content. Our empirical results based on news about the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) CEO Summit in 2013 revealed interesting and meaningful international relations among member countries.