Building an Auditable Pipeline for Cross-Language News Coverage Analysis
I began this project with what sounded like a simple question: when a fatal strike was reported in a small Lebanese town, did that specific event appear in international news coverage? I expected the difficult part to be finding the coverage. Instead, it was reconstructing what had happened accurately enough to search for it at all.
Media Cloud and Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) were never designed to communicate with each other. Media Cloud contained English-language news stories using inconsistent transliterations of Lebanese place names. NNA published Arabic reports in bursts: an initial casualty count, a later update, and sometimes a final Ministry of Public Health figure. Neither provided a shared incident identifier. Before I could compare them, I had to build that missing connection myself.
I conducted the project independently, with AI assistance for structured extraction, classification, exploratory analysis, and editorial organization. I personally reviewed the classified reports, exclusions,...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
