We present new/s/leak at a panel discussion at WissensWerte 2018, Germany’s most important dialogue forum for science journalists. On November 20, 2018 together with panelists from journalism, IT startups, and other universities, we will discuss how artificial intelligence contributes to journalistic work. In case of new/s/leak, we employ machine learning to automatically extract relevant information such as named entities and keywords from texts. This enables us to create interactive comprehensive visualizations of large text collections which contribute to a fast exploration for investigative purposes.

The paper “A Multilingual Information Extraction Pipeline for Investigative Journalism” focusing on the information extraction component of new/s/leak 2.0 has been accepted at the software demonstrations track of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing The conference paper is available in the ACL anthology (here). Abstract: We introduce an advanced information extraction pipeline to automatically process very large collections of unstructured textual data for the purpose of investigative journalism.

Newsleak will be presented at the Social Informatics conference 2018 which takes place from 25-28th of September in St. Petersburg, Russia. The conference paper is published in LNCS series of Springer (here). A preprint can be found here. Abstract: Investigative journalism in recent years is confronted with two major challenges: 1) vast amounts of unstructured data originating from large text collections such as leaks or answers to Freedom of Information requests, and 2) multi-lingual data due to intensified global cooperation and communication in politics, business and civil society.

This Saturday, we present new/s/leak at the European investigative journalism conference (EIJC). Here you can find the slides of our presentation about “Information Extraction and Visualisation for Investigative Journalism”. If you are interested to try new/s/leak with your own data, visit the Github page containing the Docker setup of our application. In June, we will publish a detailed blog post on how to setup Hoover and Newsleak to analyze collections on your own machines.

From Thursday 24 to Sunday 27 May 2018, the EIJC 2018 conference (European Investigative Journalism Conference) will take place in Michelen (Belgium). We as newsleak project will participate and discuss requirements and needs of our targeted user group. All about the conference you can find out on this website: https://dataharvesteu.wordpress.com

Last week, new/s/leak had its academic debut in the visualization science community at the Visualization in Practice Workshop, co-located with the IEEE VIS 2016 conference. Here is the paper documenting the software with a focus on visualization. Needless to say that it’s always fun to present new/s/leak and get more feedback: Thanks to everyone who came and visited us!

Our Paper “new\s\leak – A Tool for Visual Exploration of Large Text Document Collections in the Journalistic Domain” has been accepted for presentation at the poster session of the Visualization in Practice Workshop, which is part of the IEEE VIS 2016 conference. The workshop will take place in Baltimore Maryland, USA on October 24-25. VIS is one of the most important conferences in visualization science. new/s/leak fits perfectly in this year’s VIP workshop, the focus of which is design, development, distribution, and application of open source visualization and visual analytics software.

Last week, we presented new/s/leak for the first time in public: we had our demo session at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which was held in Berlin this year. If you haven’t had the chance to attend (or you had and want to have some references now): Here’s the paper documenting our software (you’ll find a large part of the information from the paper in this blog, too) Here’s our poster (in PDF format) And, of course, we took some pictures, testifying how much fun we had (click for larger versions):

Franziska, who designed and documented our requirements analysis for her research seminar paper (Studienarbeit), turned this into an article accepted for SKILL 2016, titled “new/s/leak - Anforderungsanalyse einer interaktiven Visualisierung für Data-Driven Journalism” (in German - English translation: “new/s/leak - Requirements analysis of an interactive visualization for data driven journalism”). Congrats Franziska, and of course thanks for the excellent analysis!

Our paper “new/s/leak – Information Extraction and Visualization for an Investigative Data Journalists” was accepted for the Systems Demonstration Track at ACL 2016! ACL is the most important conference for computational linguistics, and we will present new/s/leak there. Stay tuned for the final paper version - and our publicly available prototype. Looking forward to meeting you in Berlin!