New/s/leak 2.0 - Multilingual Information Extraction and Visualization for Investigative Journalism
This tool addresses the problem of handling large-scale, multilingual leaks for investigative journalists, though it appears incremental as an updated version with new features.
The paper tackles the challenges of processing vast unstructured and multilingual data in investigative journalism by presenting new/s/leak 2.0, an open-source software that enables automatic language detection and information extraction for 40 languages, entity visualization, and decentralized deployment, as demonstrated in a case study.
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. Faced with these challenges, journalists are increasingly cooperating in international networks. To support such collaborations, we present the new version of new/s/leak 2.0, our open-source software for content-based searching of leaks. It includes three novel main features: 1) automatic language detection and language-dependent information extraction for 40 languages, 2) entity and keyword visualization for efficient exploration, and 3) decentral deployment for analysis of confidential data from various formats. We illustrate the new analysis capabilities with an exemplary case study.