Journalism is in crisis, but new information and communication technologies (ICT) offer new opportunities. Journalists today have access to a wealth of digital information from news aggregators, social media, and open data providers in addition to traditional sources. These sources can be automatically analysed, organised, prepared, and stored with increasing semantic precision and connectedness. Theories and techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to classify, label, cluster, detect events, and otherwise process news streams in meaningful ways.
The News Angler project (2018-2023) has therefore aimed to help journalists find new and unexpected angles on unfolding news stories along with suitable background information. The project has therefore explored how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can use big, open data sources to support high-quality journalism. Central AI techniques have been knowledge graphs and ontologies, linked open data, natural-language processing, and other machine-learning techniques.
Our evolving News Hunter platform has continuously harvested news-related information from textual sources, such as social media, commercial news aggregators, and open reference sources. The information has then been integrated and represented in network form, so it can be analysed and shared more easily, precisely, and in new ways.
The project has been a collaboration between the University of Bergen (UiB) and Wolftech Broadcast Solutions AS, a supplier of integrated newsroom software systems for the international market. The cross-disciplinary project team at UiB belongs to the research group for Intelligent Information Systems (I2S) in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. The group is also connected to Media City Bergen through MediaFutures, a center for research-driven innovation. The projected has graduated a Ph.D. candidate and several Master students. A Post-Doc has also been employed by the project, which has furthermore had several other national and international collaborators and guests.
Sources: Andreas L Opdahl, Arne Berven, and Ingrid Aarseth Johannessen,