SUMMA: Integrating Multiple NLP Technologies into an Open-source Platform for Multilingual Media Monitoring

The open-source SUMMA Platform is a highly scalable distributed architecture for monitoring a large number of media broadcasts in parallel, with a lag behind actual broadcast time of at most a few minutes.

It assembles numerous state-of-the-art NLP technologies into a fully automated media ingestion pipeline that can record live broadcasts, detect and transcribe spoken content, translate from several languages (original text or transcribed speech) into English¹, recognize Named Entities, detect topics, cluster and summarize documents across language barriers, and extract and store factual claims in these news items.

This paper describes the intended use cases and discusses the system design decisions that allowed us to integrate state-of-the-art NLP modules into an effective workflow with comparatively little effort.
1: The choice of English as the lingua franca withinthe Platform is due to the working language of ouruse case partners; the highly modular design of thePlatform allows the easy integration of custom translationengines, if required.