Monitio: A Cutting-Edge Solution for Multilingual Media Monitoring and Analysis
,Picture this: you're a manager at a global news organization, and you need to keep an eye on all relevant stories emerging around the world. The people in your newsrooms work 24/7 (in several shifts, mind you), doing their best to monitor a mix of websites and social media platforms across multiple languages. Obviously, they use a selection of solid, well-tried digital tools, but the amount of news still feels overwhelming, information organization could be better, and resources to write unique, analytical articles remain sparse. Enter Monitio, a new AI/HLT platform, that not only scans, collects and translates the news, but also organizes, visualizes, checks, and compiles everything of relevance in a very neat fashion.
Monitio was an initiative funded by the EU's Fast Track to Innovation (FTI) program. Running from March 2021 to May 2023, the project brought together a rather small, but renowned consortium. It consisted of Portuguese IT company Priberam, Danish agency Scandinavian Communications, the University of Cambridge, and – of course – Deutsche Welle. The primary goal was to develop a ready-to-market media monitoring platform, based on concepts and software created in previous language tech projects (most notably: SUMMA). And that goal has clearly been achieved, as a visit to the official Monitio website quickly reveals.
A Versatile, Powerful Tool
After many tests and refinements, Monitio now is a versatile, powerful HLT platform that relies on recent quantum leaps in AI technology. The platform can monitor websites and social media channels (like Facebook, Twitter/X, or YouTube) in 100+ languages, depending on the user's needs and workspace settings. DW currently keeps an eye on news in 28 languages, namely those also featured on the broadcaster's own web pages.
For a better overview, Monito also offers to automatically group media items into clusters. These clusters represent storylines related to the same event, which makes it a lot easier for newsrooms to track the development of a story or debate. For each cluster, the platform can also create a summary and provide access to the media items constituting it. On top of that, Monitio can also translate selected media items (into basically any designated language) – in case users are not able to read the original.
Dataviz Features
Another very compelling and useful MONITIO feature is the platform's data visualization dashboard. In the latest version, users are offered:
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a tile view with smaller and bigger items, depending on the size of the storyline cluster
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a comprehensive list of headlines
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a heat map depicting the evolution of trending entities (people, places, organizations)
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a network graph that places entities closer to each other when they make joint appearances in various media items
Fact-Checking
Since there's a lot of mis-/disinformation out there, and not all purveyors of news can be trusted, Monitio also has a built-in verification module. Users can submit a claim, upon which the system generates customized questions in order to investigate. The catalog of questions can of course be edited and amended. After submitting the reviewed set of questions, the Monitio search engine retrieves relevant documents for the fact-check. The documents are then labeled to support or refute the claim.
Automated Newsletters
For those who want to go fully automatic with their news monitoring reports, Monitio also offers the creation of special newsletters. Those are based on sophisticated, predefined searches and clusters–and then delivered straight to an inbox of choice. Fire up the platform, pick a topic, play with the settings, save everything, then enjoy, say, a magic mobile morning briefing.
DW Innovation's Role
Next to the usual project management, concept, and co-development work, DW Innovation also focused on building two individual prototypes directly connected to MONITIO:
The first one is the "diversity tracker". It makes use of MONITIO's entity recognition features (and Wikidata) to document the gender distribution of (publicly known) people mentioned in DW articles, thus shedding more light on representation in our media content. We'll introduce this experimental software in more detail at some other point.
The second prototype is the "podcast creator", a potential game changer for AI-driven news radio, that has already been introduced in this post.
Get in Touch, Take Monitio for A Spin
With powerful features and a wide-ranging field of applications (think: media organizations, PR agencies, SMEs, government agencies), Monitio is not just another AI/HLT tool, but a platform that deserves the label "cutting edge", as it may very well contribute to a paradigm shift in multilingual media monitoring.
If you're interested in taking Monitio for a spin to see how it can benefit your organization, don't hesitate to request a demo. You can also contact the ReCo team if you have more questions regarding features and functionalities.
