We ran our trend detection tool Signi-Trend (published at KDD 2014) on news articles collected for the year 2014. We removed the category of financial news, which is overrepresented in the data set. Below are the (described) results, from the top 50 trends (I will push the raw result to appspot if possible due to file limits).

I have highlighted the top 10 trends in bold, but otherwise ordered them chronologically.

Updated: due to an error in a regexp, I had filtered out too many stories. The new results use more articles.

January

2014-01-29: Obama’s state of the union address

February

2014-02-07: Sochi Olympics gay rights protests

2014-02-08: Sochi Olympics first results

2014-02-19: Violence in Ukraine and Maidan in Kiev

2014-02-20: Wall street reaction to Facebook buying WhatsApp

2014-02-22: Yanukovich leaves Kiev

2014-02-28: Crimea crisis begins

March

2014-03-01: Crimea crisis escalates futher

2014-03-02: NATO meeting on Crimea crisis

2014-03-04: Obama presents U.S. fiscal budget 2015 plan

2014-03-08: Malaysia Airlines MH-370 missing in South China Sea

2014-03-08: MH-370: many Chinese on board of missing airplane

2014-03-15: Crimean status referencum (upcoming)

2014-03-18: Crimea now considered part of Russia by Putin

2014-03-21: Russian stocks fall after U.S. sanctions.

April

2014-04-02: Chile quake and tsunami warning

2014-04-09: False positive? experience + views

2014-04-13: Pro-russian rebels in Ukraine’s Sloviansk

2014-04-17: Russia-Ukraine crisis continues

2014-04-22: French deficit reduction plan pressure

2014-04-28: Soccer World Cup coverage: team lineups

May

2014-05-14: MERS reports in Florida, U.S.

2014-05-23: Russia feels sanctions impact

2014-05-25: EU elections

June

2014-06-06: World cup coverage

2014-06-13: Islamic state Camp Speicher massacre in Iraq

2014-06-14: Soccer world cup: Spain surprisingly destoyed by Netherlands

July

2014-07-05: Soccer world cup quarter finals

2014-07-17: Malaysian Airlines MH-17 shot down over Ukraine

2014-07-18: Russian blamed for 298 dead in airline downing

2014-07-19: Independent crash site investigation demanded

2014-07-20: Israel shelling Gaza causes 40+ casualties in a day

August

2014-08-07: Russia bans food imports from EU and U.S.

2014-08-08: Obama orders targeted air strikes in Iraq

2014-08-20: IS murders journalist James Foley, air strikes continue

2014-08-30: EU increases sanctions against Russia

September

2014-09-05: NATO summit with respect to IS and Ukraine conflict

2014-09-11: Scottish referendum upcoming - poll results are close

2014-09-23: U.N. on legality of U.S. air strikes in Syria against IS

2014-09-26: Star manager Bill Gross leaves Allianz/PIMCO for Janus

October

2014-10-22: Ottawa parliament shooting

2014-10-26: EU banking review

November

2014-11-05: U.S. Senate and governor elections

2014-11-12: Foreign exchange manipulation investigation results

2014-11-17: Japan recession

December

2014-12-11: CIA prisoner and U.S. torture centers revieled

2014-12-15: Sydney cafe hostage siege

2014-12-17: U.S. and Cuba relations improve unexpectedly

2014-12-18: Putin criticizes NATO, U.S., Kiev

2014-12-28: AirAsia flight QZ-8501 missing

As you can guess, we are really happy with this result - just like the result for 2013 it mentiones (almost) all the key events.

There probably is one “false positive” there: 2014-04-09 has a lot of articles talking about “experience” and “views”, but not all refer to the same topic (we did not do topic modeling yet).

There are also some events missing that we would have liked to appear; many of these barely did not make it into the top 50, but do appear in the top 100, such as the Sony cyberattack (#51) and the Fergusson riots on November 11 (#66).

You can also explore the results online in a snapshot.