News moves markets. In recent history we have seen questionable and fake news. Sameena and her team created Reuters News Tracer that is able to detect news events and provide its credibility. Sameena will present some of the technology that empowers Reuters News Tracer.

1. Reuters Tracer
Sameena Shah, Thomson Reuters
Quantcon 2017

2. How do you find out what is
happening in the world ?

3. The Twitter Disruption
30%
*http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682521/twitter-vs-mainstream-media-science-proves-which-breaks-news-faster
*https://sgi.seleritycorp.com/twitter-becoming-major-source-breaking-business-news-selerity-study/
How much news breaks on Twitter before appearing in
major news media?

4. SOCIAL BIG PART OF NEWS
GENERATION/DISSEMINATION
> Keyword searches. You may get up to 7 million tweets a day.
Not foolproof
Coverage
limited to
keywords you
think of
Not timely Too much noise
apple ...
apple pie
apple juice
apple cider
acquitted
off the hook
not guilty
walks free
exonerated
a AND (b
OR (c AND
d)) AND NOT
e) OR (f AND g)
OR ...

5. TweetDeck
$40
Million
Ad
Spam
Opinion
No
cluster,
topic,
veracity
Keyword
based
search

6. Samsung1080pLEDHDTV+$75GCfor
$200
Lovemynewapt!
37Milbeesdropdead
afterGMOcornplanted
DidGMOCornReallyKillAllThoseBeesin
Canada?
SomeschoolsinMedicineHatonlockdown
today.
MedicineHatschoolsonlockdownaspoliceinvestigate
textmessagethreats.
TextthreatputsMHat
schoolonlockdown.
Medicine Hat school schools on lockdown after
text message threats.
37 million bees killed by GMO corn treated with
Neonicotinoids.
health/politics
crime/crisis
✔
✗
newsworthy
newsworthy
37MillionBeesFoundDeadAfterGMO
CornFieldTreatedWithNeonicotinoids

7. Reuters Tracer

8. organization of
information
clustering
topic categorization
opinion vs fact
spam/advert/chat detection
newsworthiness
1
2
3
4
knowledge baseclustering summarization credibility
☑
verify
(automated, real-time) ✔
social media data
importance classifiers
language identification
profanity detection
POS tagging
source, message, user cluster event features
trend analysis
¿
〷
⚯
💬
📈
ingestion platform
real-time ingestion
storage
common JSON format
metadata addition/removal

9. topic / expert KB
geography
/ organization
KB
categorization to
determine which
KBs to link to
event
verifiable by
witness
event
verifiable by
experts
Tweets pulled for relevant users based on handles received are appended to initial
clusters.
@ @
Twitter
handles of
relevant
users
✔
Dynamic verification score computed based on feature values received.
Verification feature computation: message support & negation, source witness,
source location, source identity, source diversity, source credibility, original source.
+
+

10. EXPERTSLOCATIONS
Tweets,
User data,
Network
+

11. 11

13. Q&A