EMM, Europe Media Monitor.

Abstract not availableJRC.G-Institute for the Protection and the Security of the Citizen (Ispra

Mapping World Events

Techniques are described which attempt to synthesise world events based on 15,000 news reports culled from the Internet each day, and to detect and visualise Breaking News Stories derived from changes in Flux and clustering analysis Statistical Indicators for individual countries have been defined, and software written which calculates these thematic indicators for all world countries. This work builds on the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) in use by the European Commission ( http://press.jrc.it ). EMM has invented a powerful method of rapidly classifying multilingual articles by matching weighted combinations of phrase and word patterns. The articles are cross-classified according to the countries mentioned and to general themes like "Conflict" "FoodSecurity" "Natural Disaster" "Ecology" and so on. The Alert system runs 24 hours per day keeping continuous hourly statistics on article populations. This allows SOTW to provide real-time graphical presentations of "news maps" time series of Indicators, and animations of crisis developments. More detailed geolocation of news based on Town names and Gazetteers, coupled with a "Top News" clustering algorithm results in 24 hourly News distributions. This technique also links clusters through to different language versions and back through time. Geospatial representation of news developments enables decision makers to better sumariseJRC.G.2-Support to external securit

EMM: Supporting the Analyst by Turning Multilingual Text into Structured Data

All information-seeking professionals need to sieve through large amounts of text to retrieve the information they need so that they can stay up-to-date of develop-ments in their field. Language Technology tools can help make the analyst’s work more efficient by increasing the amount of data analysed and by speeding up the process. Software tools applied to big data may additionally provide a bird’s view of trends and data distributions not easily visible to the human reader. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications, which aims to provide solutions for the daily media monitoring needs of a large variety of users working in diverse fields. EMM gathers and analyses hundreds of thousands of news articles every day in up to seventy languages. Due to the large scale of the effort, EMM can track topics, detect trends and act as an early warning tool. In this chapter, we present the functionality and the benefits of EMM’s news analysis capacity, but we also aim to make the reader aware of the potential dangers of automated large-scale media monitoring. The EMM team makes available for free a number of linguistic tools and resources that can be used by information specialists to improve their own analysis of large sets of textual data.JRC.I.3-Text and Data Minin