Press Freedom Monitor: Detection of Reported Press and Media Freedom Violations in Twitter and News Articles

Tariq Yousef, Antje Schlaf, Janos Borst, Andreas Niekler, Gerhard Heyer


Abstract
Freedom of the press and media is of vital importance for democratically organised states and open societies. We introduce the Press Freedom Monitor, a tool that aims to detect reported press and media freedom violations in news articles and tweets. It is used by press and media freedom organisations to support their daily monitoring and to trigger rapid response actions. The Press Freedom Monitor enables the monitoring experts to get a fast overview over recently reported incidents and it has shown an impressive performance in this regard. This paper presents our work on the tool, starting with the training phase, which comprises defining the topic-related keywords to be used for querying APIs for news and Twitter content and evaluating different machine learning models based on a training dataset specifically created for our use case. Then, we describe the components of the production pipeline, including data gathering, duplicates removal, country mapping, case mapping and the user interface. We also conducted a usability study to evaluate the effectiveness of the user interface, and describe improvement plans for future work.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
153–159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.18
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.18
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tariq Yousef, Antje Schlaf, Janos Borst, Andreas Niekler, and Gerhard Heyer. 2021. Press Freedom Monitor: Detection of Reported Press and Media Freedom Violations in Twitter and News Articles. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 153–159, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Press Freedom Monitor: Detection of Reported Press and Media Freedom Violations in Twitter and News Articles (Yousef et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.18.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.18.mp4