Trouble on the horizon

• Autores: Douglas Heaven
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2916, 2013, págs. 19-20
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The world's largest database of geopolitical events has been released. And as it is refined, it could make forecasting events--and conflicts, in particular--as common as predicting the weather. The Global Data on Events, Location and Tone data set contains nearly a quarter of a billion events going back to 1979 and hoovers up 100,00 new events every day. Its software scours media sources, such as the Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Xinhua, the main news agency in China. Collectively, the sources monitored cover every country in the world. The software automatically extracts information from these news reports then uses natural-language processing to turn them into data points. Next, the system finds the nearest mention of a city or locality in the text and adds its latitude and longitude to the event data. The system can recognize different phrasings of who did what to whom and where. This helps it avoid duplicating events when they are mentioned in several news reports.