I spent yesterday afternoon at UCL for ISKO UK‘s event on Taming the News Beast – I’m not sure if we found out how to tame it but we certainly heard how to festoon it with metadata and lock it up in a nice secure ontology. There were around 90 people attending from news, content, technology and academic organisations, including quite a few young journalism students visiting London from Missouri.
The first talk was by Matt Shearer of BBC News Labs who described how they are working on automatically extracting entities from video/audio content (including verbatim transcripts, contributors using face/voice recognition, objects using audio/image recognition, topics, actions and non-verbal events including clapping). Their prototype ‘Juicer’ extractor currently works with around 680,000 source items and applies 5.7 million tags – which represents around 9 man years for a manual tagger. They are using Stanford NLP and DBpedia heavily, as well as an internal BBC project ‘Mango’ – I hope that some of the software they are developing is eventually open sourced as after all this is a publically-funded broadcaster. His colleague Jeremy Tarling was next and described a News Storyline concept they had been working on a new basis for the BBC News website (which apparently hasn’t changed much in 17 years, and still depends on a lot of manual tagging by journalists). The central concept of a storyline (e.g. ‘US spy scandal’) can form a knowledge graph, linked to events (‘Snowden leaves airport’), videos, ‘explainer’ stories, background items etc. Topics can be used to link storylines together. This was a fascinating idea, well explained and something other news organisations should certainly take note of.
Next was Rob Corrao of LAC Group describing how they had helped ABC News revolutionize their existing video library which contains over 2 million assets. They streamlined the digitization process, moved little-used analogue assets out of expensive physical storage, re-organised teams and shift patterns and created a portal application to ease access to the new ‘video library as a service’. There was a focus on deep reviews of existing behaviour and a pragmatic approach to what did and didn’t need to be digitized. This was a talk more about process and management rather than technology but the numbers were impressive: at the end of the project they were handling twice the volume with half the people.
Ian Roberts from the University of Sheffield then described AnnoMarket, a cloud-based market platform for text analytics, which wraps the rather over-complex open source GATE project in an API with easy scalability. As they have focused on precision over recall, AnnoMarket beats other cloud-based NLP services such as OpenCalais and TextRazor in terms of accuracy, and can process impressive volumes of documents (10 million in a few hours was quoted). They have developed custom pipelines for news, biomedical and Twitter content with the former linked into the Press Association‘s ontology (PA is a partner in AnnoMarket). For those wanting to carry out entity extraction and similar processes on large volumes of content at low cost AnnoMarket certainly looks attractive.
Next was Pete Sowerbutts of PA on the prototype interface he had helped develop for tagging all of PA’s 3000 daily news stories with entity information. I hadn’t known how influential PA is in the UK news sector – apparently 30% of all UK news is a direct copy of a PA feed and they estimate 70% is influenced by PA’s content. The UI showed how entities that have been automatically extracted can be easily confirmed by PA’s staff, allowing for confirmation that the right entity is being used (the example being Chris Evans who could be both a UK MP, a television personality and an American actor). One would assume the extractor produces some kind of confidence measure which begs the question whether every single entity must be manually confirmed – but then again, PA must retain their reputation for high quality.
The event finished with a brief open discussion featuring some of the speakers on an informal panel, followed by networking over drinks and snacks. Thanks to all at ISKO especially Helen Lippell for organising what proved to be a very interesting day.
