Online Digital Investigative Journalism using SociaLens

TL;DR

SociaLens is an autonomous AI-powered tool that enhances investigative journalism by enabling data collection, analysis, and report generation from online sources without coding expertise, leveraging ML, LLMs, and big data techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces SociaLens, a versatile, autonomous investigative journalism system integrating ML, LLMs, and big data search techniques, capable of data extraction, analysis, and report generation.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated on rape incident case study

Enables journalists to gain insights without coding skills

Capable of generating textual and visual reports

Abstract

Media companies witnessed a significant transformation with the rise of the internet, bigdata, machine learning (ML) and AI. Recent emergence of large language models (LLM) have added another aspect to this transformation. Researchers believe that with the help of these technologies, investigative digital journalism will enter a new era. Using a smart set of data gathering and analysis tools, journalists will be able to create data driven contents and insights in unprecedented ways. In this paper, we introduce a versatile and autonomous investigative journalism tool, called {\em SociaLens}, for identifying and extracting query specific data from online sources, responding to probing queries and drawing conclusions entailed by large volumes of data using ML analytics fully autonomously. We envision its use in investigative journalism, law enforcement and social policy planning. The proposed system capitalizes on the integration of ML technology with LLMs and advanced bigdata search techniques. We illustrate the functionality of SociaLens using a focused case study on rape incidents in a developing country and demonstrate that journalists can gain nuanced insights without requiring coding expertise they might lack. SociaLens is designed as a ChatBot that is capable of contextual conversation, find and collect data relevant to queries, initiate ML tasks to respond to queries, generate textual and visual reports, all fully autonomously within the ChatBot environment.