The Computable News project: Research in the Newsroom

Will Radford, Daniel Tse, Joel Nothman, Ben Hachey, George Wright, James R. Curran, Will Cannings, Timothy O'Keefe, Matthew Honnibal, David Vadas, Candice Loxley

Abstract: We report on a four year academic research project to build a natural language processing platform in support of a large media company. The Computable News platform processes news stories, producing a layer of structured data that can be used to build rich applications. We describe the underlying platform and the research tasks that we explored building it. The platform supports a wide range of prototype applications designed to support different newsroom functions. We hope that this qualitative review provides some insight into the challenges involved in this type of project.