New/s/leak 2.0: Second project phase finished
31 July 2019, by Reinhard Zierke
We are happy to announce the release of version 2.0 of our software new/s/leak for information extraction and interactive visualization of textual datasets for investigative journalism and eDiscovery.
The second version of the tool new/s/leak, developed jointly by the Language Technology department (Prof. Chris Biemann) and SPIEGEL, was completed in July 2019. New/s/leak supports journalists in the evaluation of very large volumes of documents, such as those that repeatedly emerge from leaks of internal company or government data.
The approach of the open-source software is the automatic identification of proper names as well as their visualization and filtering along relationship networks in the documents. In this way, one can quickly gain insight into otherwise unmanageable amounts of data and find starting points for journalistic reporting.
During the second project phase, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation, the software was optimized for fast processing of new document collections and numerous file formats. In addition, new/s/leak now supports more than 40 languages.
A third project phase to support Open Government Data is planned for next year. Together with SPIEGEL, HITeC e.V. and the Transparenzparenzportal Hamburg, funds were successfully raised in the funding line "Calls for Transfer" from the city of Hamburg.
More information, installation instructions and a software demonstration can be found at https://newsleak.io