Applications of NewsTools
The NewsTools Project
Potential application areas
The NewsTools Project is aimed at developing tools for analysing and merging news reports that are represented in the form of structured text. We envisage applications of NewsTools in a wide range of domains. Our current research focus is on short business news reports containing information such as mergers and acquisitions annoucements. Whilst we take a broad interpretation on what news is, we assume that each NewsTool can only be developed for a narrow domain.
Possible domains for NewsTools may be found in the following kinds of news:
The technology in this project is aimed at the many professionals who are complaining about the need to process and organize a large amount of heterogeneous information, in particular of news reports, in the course of their work. This includes financial analysts in banks and investment companies; scientists in the pharmaceutical sector, risk analysts in insurance companies; market researchers; competitor researchers; public relations analysts; journalists; political analysts; management consultants; property consultants; geopolitical analysts in government agencies, etc.
We stress that news does not necessarily have to be from news feeds from big suppliers but can come from smaller suppliers on specialized topics eg patent applications in the drugs industry, tender announcements for government contracts, contract announcements by IT companies, etc. Furthermore, we do not need to restrict consideration to externally sourced news reports. Many organizations distribute various kinds of news in various forms internally.
In addition, the techniques proposed here could be useful in a far wider range of applications. Handling inconsistency is a major problem in many areas of IT and solutions based on measuring inconsistency could have wide applicability including in data and knowledge engineering, language engineering, multi-agent systems, distributed information systems, and software engineering.
For more information about the NewsTools Project, contact Tony Hunter (a.hunter@cs.ucl.ac.uk or +44 20 7679 7295), or look at the NewsTools Project
home page.