A System for Worldwide COVID-19 Information Aggregation

TL;DR

This paper presents a multilingual COVID-19 information aggregation system that collects, translates, and categorizes news articles from multiple regions to help users access relevant pandemic-related information efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive system integrating crowdsourced data collection, neural machine translation, and BERT-based topic classification for global COVID-19 news aggregation.

Findings

Collected reliable articles from 10 regions in 7 languages

Achieved effective translation into Japanese and English

Implemented accurate topic classification with BERT

Abstract

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has made the public pay close attention to related news, covering various domains, such as sanitation, treatment, and effects on education. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 condition is very different among the countries (e.g., policies and development of the epidemic), and thus citizens would be interested in news in foreign countries. We build a system for worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation containing reliable articles from 10 regions in 7 languages sorted by topics. Our reliable COVID-19 related website dataset collected through crowdsourcing ensures the quality of the articles. A neural machine translation module translates articles in other languages into Japanese and English. A BERT-based topic-classifier trained on our article-topic pair dataset helps users find their interested information efficiently by putting articles into different categories.