News Insider: Innovating News Understanding to Improve the Quality of Reading Experience

Zhengkui Wang, Soumyadeb Chowdhury, Malcolm Yoke Hean Low, Wen Shan

Abstract: Currently, with the advent of myriad news applications, which have increased the volume of information, users are faced with the challenge of discovering this information effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we present one web-based news platform, NewsInsider, providing an array of novel features for exploring and reading news in Singapore. NewsInsider integrates multiple news crawlers to extract news from online sources, employs news analytics and Artificial Intelligence to automatically process the news (e.g., categorizing the news, extracting trending topics, detecting the named entities, and tagging the geographic location to the news). Based on all the extracted information, NewsInsider provides the readers with novel search functionalities to find news stories using the location, categories, topics, entities, and postcodes. Additionally, NewsInsider employs visual graphs and a master-detailed interface to present the information related to news stories in a meaningful and intuitive way.