Clustering news across languages enables efficient media monitoring by aggregating articles from multilingual sources into coherent stories. Doing so in an online setting allows scalable processing of massive news streams. To this end, we describe a novel method for clustering an incoming stream of multilingual documents into monolingual and crosslingual story clusters. Unlike typical clustering approaches that consider a small and known number of labels, we tackle the problem of discovering an ever growing number of cluster labels in an online fashion, using real news datasets in multiple languages. Our method is simple to implement, computationally efficient and produces state-of-the-art results on datasets in German, English and Spanish.

We present a new neural model for text summarization that first extracts sentences from a document and then compresses them. The proposed model offers a balance that sidesteps the difficulties in abstractive methods while generating more concise summaries than extractive methods. In addition, our model dynamically determines the length of the output summary based on the gold summaries it observes during training, and does not require length constraints typical to extractive summarization. The model achieves state-of-the-art results on the CNN/DailyMail and Newsroom datasets, improving over current extractive and abstractive methods. Human evaluations demonstrate that our model generates concise and informative summaries. We also make available a new dataset of oracle compressive summaries derived automatically from the CNN/DailyMail reference summaries.

The open-source SUMMA Platform is a highly scalable distributed architecture for monitoring a large number of media broadcasts in parallel, with a lag behind actual broadcast time of at most a few minutes. The Platform offers a fully automated media ingestion pipeline capable of recording live broadcasts, detection and transcription of spoken content, translation of all text (original or transcribed) into English, recognition and linking of Named Entities, topic detection, clustering and crosslingual multi-document summarization of related media items, and last but not least, extraction and storage of factual claims in these news items. Browser-based graphical user interfaces provide humans with aggregated information as well as structured access to individual news items stored in the Platform's database. This paper describes the intended use cases and provides an overview over the system's implementation.

Fact checking is an essential task in journalism; its importance has been highlighted due to recently increased concerns and efforts in combating misinformation. In this paper, we present an automated fact checking platform which given a claim, it retrieves relevant textual evidence from a document collection, predicts whether each piece of evidence supports or refutes the claim, and returns a final verdict. We describe the architecture of the system and the user interface, focusing on the choices made to improve its user friendliness and transparency. We conduct a user study of the factchecking platform in a journalistic setting: we integrated it with a collection of news articles and provide an evaluation of the platform using feedback from journalists in their workflow. We found that the predictions of our platform were correct 58% of the time, and 59% of the returned evidence was relevant.

In the medical domain and other scientific areas, it is often important to recognize different levels of hierarchy in entity mentions, such as those related to specific symptoms or diseases associated with different anatomical regions. Unlike previous approaches, we build a transition-based parser that explicitly models an arbitrary number of hierarchical and nested mentions, and propose a loss that encourages correct predictions of higher-level mentions. We further propose a set of modifier classes which introduces certain concepts that change the meaning of an entity, such as absence, or uncertainty about a given disease. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results in medical entity recognition datasets, using both nested and hierarchical mentions.

We present the first prototype of the SUMMA Platform: an integrated platform for multilingual media monitoring. The platform contains a rich suite of low-level and high-level natural language processing technologies: automatic speech recognition of broadcast media, machine translation, automated tagging and classification of named entities, semantic parsing to detect relationships between entities, and automatic construction / augmentation of factual knowledge bases. Implemented on the Docker platform, it can easily be deployed, customised, and scaled to large volumes of incoming media streams.

No abstract

No abstract