基于新闻大数据的北极地区地缘关系研究

Global warming has caused a shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice cover. It endangered the environment, but made the Arctic channel possible. Therefore, the strategic position of the Arctic has been improved significantly. As a near-Arctic country, China has formulated relevant Arctic policies, which will be directly affected by the changes in the international relations between the eight Arctic countries (region). A comprehensive and real-time analysis on the variation characteristics of the Arctic geographical relationship is required in China, which can provide instructions for formulating political, economic and diplomatic countermeasures in the Arctic. Massive global real-time open databases, such as GDELT (The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone) global news event database, provide news data from major media in various countries. And this makes it possible to monitor the geographical relationship in real time. Based on the GDELT database and the method of labeled-LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), this paper explored the key elements in social development of eight Arctic countries (region) over the past seven years. This paper also constructed the national interaction network, and identified the evolution pattern of the relations between the Arctic countries. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) Arctic news focused on climate change and ice sheet melting, which had become the main driving factor for the change of international relations in the Arctic; (2) There was a strong correlation between the number of ice sheet melting news pieces and the sea ice area; (3) With the melting of the ice sheet, the social, economic and military activities in the Arctic were booming, and the competition for dominance was becoming increasingly fierce. Generally, a pattern dominated by Russia and Canada was formed.