EMBEDDIA Tools, Datasets and Challenges: Resources and Hackathon Contributions (2021)

Abstract: This paper presents tools and data sources collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The collected resources were offered to participants of a hackathon organized as part of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation in February 2021. The hackathon had six participating teams who addressed different challenges, either from the list of proposed challenges or their own news-industry-related tasks. This paper goes beyond the scope of the hackathon, as it brings together in a coherent and compact form most of the resources developed, collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project. Moreover, it constitutes a handy source for news media industry and researchers in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Social Science.

## introduction news media industry is the primary provider of information for society and individuals. since the first newspaper was published, the propagation of information has continuously changed as new technologies are adopted by the news media, and the advent of the internet has made this change faster than ever @xcite . internetbased media (e.g., social media, forums and blogs) have made news more accessible, and dissemination more affordable, resulting in drastically increased media coverage. social media can also help provide source information for newsrooms, as shown in e.g., disaster response tasks @xcite . suitable natural language processing techniques are needed to analyze news archives and gain insight about the evolution of our society, while dealing with the constant flow of information. relevant datasets are equally important in order to train data-driven approaches. to encourage the development and uptake of such techniques and datasets, and take on the challenges presented by the introduction of new technologies in the news media industry, the embeddia project foot_0 organized, in conjunction with eacl 2021, a hackathon foot_1 as part of the eacl hackashop on news media content analysis and automated report generation foot_2 . for this event, held virtually in february 2021, the datasets and tools curated and implemented by the embeddia project were publicly released and made available to the participants. we also provided examples of realistic challenges faced by today's newsrooms, and offered technical support and consultancy sessions with a news media expert throughout the entire duration of the hackathon. the contributions of this paper are structured as follows. section 2 presents the tools released for the event. the newly gathered, publicly released embeddia datasets are reported in section 3. section 4 presents sample news media challenges. section 5 outlines the projects undertaken by the teams who completed the hackathon. the hackathon outcomes are summarized in section 6. ## tools the embeddia tools and models released for the hackathon include general text processing tools like language processing frameworks and text representation models (section 2.1), news article analysis (section 2.2), news comment analysis (section 2.3), and news article and headline generation (section 2.4) tools. these tools require different levels of technical proficiency. language processing tools and frameworks require little to no programming skills. on the other hand, for some tasks, we provide fully functional systems that can be used out of the box but require a certain level of technical knowledge in order to be fully utilized. moreover, some tools and text representation models require programming skills and can be employed to improve existing systems, implement new analytic tools, or to be adapted to new uses. ## datasets for the purposes of the hackashop, the embed-dia media partners released their news archives, the majority of which are now being made publicly available for use after the project. ## challenges sample news media challenge addressed in the em-beddia project come from three different areas: news analysis, news comments analysis, and article and headline generation. ## hackathon contributions six teams with 24 members in total participated in the hackathon during 1-19 february 2021. the challenges described in section 4 were offered to the teams as examples of interesting problems in the area of news media analysis and generation. the teams had, however, the freedom to choose and formulate their own aims for the hackathon. likewise, they were offered the data, tools and models described above. the hackathon was organized online, with three joint events to kick off the activities, to meet and talk about the ongoing work halfway, and to wrap up the work at the end. ample support on tools, models, data and challenges was provided by the embeddia experts via several channels. the six teams all picked up different challenges and set themselves specific goals. reports from five teams are included in these proceedings. three teams worked on news content analysis: two teams looked at different challenges related to comment analysis: finally, one team worked on a generation task: ## conclusions this paper presents the contributions of the em-beddia project, including a large variety of tools, new datasets of news articles and comments from the media partners, as well as challenges that were proposed to the participants of the eacl 2021 hackathon on news media content analysis and automated report generation. the hackathon had six participating teams who addressed different challenges, either from the list of proposed challenges or their own news-industry-related tasks. in the future, the tools and resources described can be used for a large variety of new experiments, and we hope that the proposed challenges will be addressed by the wider nlp research community.