Year one summary

A central task in the first year of the project was conducting and preparing publication of systematic literature reviews. The research group did technical groundwork and planned the doctoral and post-doctoral projects. The group has presented and published several contributions to international and national conferences. Themes have been architecture for the News Angler platform, the concepts of news angles and newsworthiness from an ICT perspective, analogical reasoning about news angles, and ontologies for representing journalistic information in network form. The first journal articles from the project are now being evaluated by renowned international journals.

Year two summary

In its second year, the project has published several papers in international journals and made conference and workshop presentations. Many other papers are in preparation or under review. We have initiated collaboration with researchers at The Open University in UK on representing and reasoning over angles. The News Hunter platform has been re-implemented from scratch using state-of-the-art big data and cloud technologies. Harvesters, basic lifters, and central data stores are in place, and work continues on more advanced text analysis and lifting and on representing and reasoning over news angles. Due to the Covid-19 situation, our planned advisory board meeting unfortunately had to be cancelled.

Year three summary

In its third year, the project continued to publish research results in international journals and at conferences and workshops. The News Hunter platform was expanded with several new components for text analysis, relation extraction, lifting and aggregation of GDELT data, and detection of location angles. We also held a two-day electronic meeting with our international advisory panel. We worked on creating synergy between the News Angler project and the newly established MediaFutures center for research-driven innovation, where Wolftech was a partner and the News Angler research team led (and still leads) a work package. We also began planning further projects in the aftermath of News Angler.

Year four summary

In the fourth year – originally planned as the project’s last – we worked on finalizing the project results and exploring plans to continue work after the project’s end. One focus was to expand the News Hunter platform with the latest natural language analysis techniques and prepare the platform for publication as open-source for education and further research. We also continued the conceptual work of representing and analyzing news angles computationally. Another focus was to publish our results in international journals, notably to complete the project’s PhD thesis, which was ultimately submitted in the first part of 2023. A journal article on challenges and opportunities for journalistic knowledge platforms had already been published, and several other articles were prepared during the year. Our extensive review of knowledge graphs for news work was accepted for publication in the esteemed ACM Computing Surveys.

Final year summary

In a final extension of the project period, Marc Gallofré Ocaña has defended his PhD thesis, and we have published even more results in international journals, including a comprehensive study on the reliable use of AI for news work in collaboration with industry partners. We are also collaborating with leading international researchers on a special issue of Wiley’s AI Magazine on «Artificial Intelligence and News.»