EXTRA Progress - Building an Open Source News Classification Engine

Over the last year, I've been leading a project within the IPTC to build an open source rules-based classification engine for news. Dubbed "EXTRA" (shorthand for EXTraction Rules Apparatus), the software will be freely-available under an MIT license. The work is being funded by a grant of €50,000 from Google's Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund.

“Extra” by Jeremy Brooks https://flic.kr/p/4aKH3c

We have drawn up the technical requirements, hired Infalia PC to partner with us on building the software and selected Elasticsearch's percolator as the fundamental technology. We've licensed two news corpora - English from Reuters and German from the Austrian Press Agency. Linguists are creating rules for classifying those corpora with IPTC’s Media Topics using the EXTRA engine.

I'm thrilled to say that the project is on track to deliver a working version of the engine, together with the sample rules, by the summer of 2017. Read more about the project at https://iptc.org/news/extra-iptc-infalia-elasticsearch-open-source-rules-based-classification-engine/ and feel free to contact me for more information.

Developers Needed For IPTC's EXTRA Rules-based Classification Engine

Over the last several months, I've been working within the IPTC - along with a number of other news organizations - on "EXTRA" (shorthand for EXTraction Rules Apparatus), an open-source source rules based classification engine for news content. I'm thrilled because this week we reached a significant milestone: we started the formal process of looking for developers to implement the EXTRA engine.

“Extra” by Jeremy Brooks https://flic.kr/p/4aKH3c

The IPTC was awarded a grant of €50,000 from Google's Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund to build and freely distribute the initial version of EXTRA. As part of the IPTC, we are working with several news providers to supply sets of news documents, and with linguists to write rules to classify the documents. We've been working on defining the technical requirements and now we’re looking for software developers to design, develop, document and test EXTRA.

Below is the formal announcement. If you know anyone who might be interested, let them know. And if you are interested, please let us know!

Developers Needed For IPTC's EXTRA Rules-based Classification Engine

IPTC https://iptc.org/ is looking for software developers to design, develop, document and test EXTRA https://iptc.github.io/extra/, an open source rules-based classification engine for news. First preference will be given to applications received by 21st October 2016, and review will continue until the positions are filled. Applyhere.

"Classification" means assigning one or more categories to the text of a news document. Rules based classifiers use a set of Boolean rules, rather than machine-learning or statistical techniques, to determine which categories to apply.

EXTRA is the EXTraction Rules Apparatus, a multilingual open-source platform for rules-based classification of news content. IPTC was awarded a grant of €50,000 from the first round of Google’s Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund https://www.digitalnewsinitiative.com/ to build and freely distribute the initial version of EXTRA. DNI granted IPTC €50,000 for the entire project.

We are working with news providers to supply sets of news documents and with linguists to write rules to classify the documents. IPTC is looking for qualified developers to create the rules engine to accurately and efficiently categorize the documents using the rules. mandatory and preferred requirements.

Please consult this page for more information and to let us know if you’re interested in being considered.