New/s/leak 2.0 - Multilingual Information Extraction and Visualization for Investigative Journalism

TL;DR

new/s/leak 2.0 is an open-source tool that enhances multilingual investigative journalism by enabling automatic language detection, language-specific information extraction, visualization, and decentralized analysis of large, confidential text datasets.

Contribution

It introduces three novel features: multilingual support with 40 languages, entity and keyword visualization, and decentralized deployment for confidential data analysis.

Findings

Supports 40 languages for extraction and analysis

Enables visualization of entities and keywords

Facilitates decentralized analysis of confidential data

Abstract

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.