Printed Press Intelligence Analytics

The tendency in most first world countries is clear: paper news are clearly declining, while online news have been on the rise for over a decade now. The immediacy of online platforms makes them an ideal transport medium, to get the information as quick as possible to the consumers. However, not all countries are equally digitized and many still have their major publication on a paper medium. What is more, especially those countries with a less digital culture need usually more surveillance, as they tend to be less politically stable than others. And this is where Intelion helps, providing an AI Analytics platform able to extract information from traditional media.

Because analyzing information on paper is a tedious and complicated task, that involves a great effort and many man-hours, the first step is digitizing the printed material, to import it into the digital realm, where it can be processed, transmitted and analyzed with ease and a great variety of tools. With the help of scanner with auto-feeding this process does not take too long and does not require too much human intervention.

The scanner output is sent directly to one of Intelion’s watchfolders (special folders monitored by the system that ingest and analyze all incoming material automatically) from where it enters the processing pipeline. Thanks to the programmable workflow module (BPM), Intelion will now exactly what tasks to apply to the incoming pages. Usually, the first step is sending the pages to an OCR, so the text can be converted into a processable and editable format.

After that, the BPM decides what kind of AI analyzers should be applied to the resulting text and images. The platform users define a series of processing rules for the different publications, which Intelion applies automatically to all incoming material.

For example, a face recognition could be applied to the scanned images, to recognize prominent figures. But more frequently, the text is scanned for the keywords that interest the user more, to classify and sort the material in the database. Then, the internal search engine can be used to find out which topics are more relevant, how many where published, by which media outlet or diary, etc.

The system also shows the context of the different keywords, to gain a better understanding of how the news were expressed and if there is some bias in the publication, or not. A click on any keyword shows the corresponding publication scan on screen, so the original page can be inspected without leaving Intelion. This allows to process a great amount of printed material in a very short time.

Finally, Intelion provides the possibility to create AI generated summaries of long texts in multiple publications, in order to get a quick overview of the general tone and contents of a particular matter, event or news item without the need of reading all the articles from beginning to end.

Besides this, the platform generates reports of the selected items in different formats, so they can be shared or sent to third parties, with all the analytics already applied and conclusions drawn. This functionality is especially useful for government press departments which need to wade through a lot of material each day to get an accurate understanding of the current news cycle.