Signal & Noise

Hybrid conference
27th October 2022 9.00-14.00 CET

Conference

Title: Automation of sources in journalistic discourse - examples of good practice.
Organised as part of the presentation of project outputs: "The Signal and the Noise in the Era of Journalism 5.0 - A Comparative Perspective of Journalistic Genres of Automated Content".

Date & Time: October 27, 2022. 9:00 - 14:00 CET.

Place:
Online: Zoom (link below),
In-person: Czech Radio, Vinohradská st. 12, Prague 2.

The aim of the project, which connects journalism and computer science: is a comparative perspective and reflection on journalistic genres after the advent of automated journalism and artificial intelligence journalism. There are fundamental changes in the field of news gathering (e.g. the issue of automation of journalistic sources to the factuality and accuracy of the information, suppression of imbalances in individual types of sources – dominance of male sources, etc.) and news production (e.g. automated creation of audiovisual content, including robotic announcer). Both entities in the field of journalism are viewed through the perspective of content recipients. The outputs of the project should then contribute to minimizing the adverse effects of technology on humans.

Presentations online:

  1. Belen Lopez Garrido a Rayan Arnaout (EBU - Switzerland)
  2. Tomáš Kriššák (Gerulata - Slovakia)
  3. Karina Stasiuk-Krajewska (SWPS  - Poland)
  4. Alžběta Solarczyk Krausová (The Institute of State and Law - Czechia)
  5. Barbora Hladká, Radek Mařík (Charles Uni., Czech Technical Uni. - Czechia)
  6. Jan Drchal (Czech Technical Uni. - Czechia)
  7. Jiří Špaček (Czech Radio - Czechia)
  8. Martin Čmejrek (The MAMA AI - Czechia)

Video archive (~3GB)
MP4 file format, download link here.

Program & Presentations

9.00
Presenter: Luboš Král (Czech Technical University)

Track 1. International Experience with Automation in Journalism

9.10
Belen Lopez Garrido a Rayan Arnaout
 EBU (Switzerland), Technology & Innovation Department
News Pilot

9.40
Tomáš Kriššák
 Gerulata Technologies
The curious origins of cognitive crisis
We live in a time of shifting crises that often have artificial origins and amplifiers. The curious origins of cognitive crisis will bring answers and data analysis on who, why and when affected hearts and minds of Slovaks in 4 different crises that led to various cognitive and other social and economic harms in recent years.

10.10 - 10.20 Coffee break

10.20
Karina Stasiuk-Krajewska
 Media expert, specializing in media theory and ethics of professional communication, SWPS University of Social Sciences, Warszawa, Poland

10.50
Alžběta Solarczyk Krausová
The Institute of State and Law
Awareness of Personalization in the Czech Media and Its Ethical and Legal Implications
Personalized recommendation of online content is a widespread phenomenon. Recent research in the Czech media, however, showed that nearly 45 % of the respondents working for the Czech media do not know whether their employer personalizes websites for their users. Out of those respondents claiming that their employer uses personalization, more than half do not understand how such personalization is done. These findings strongly contrast with the ethical requirements for so-called trustworthy artificial intelligence. This presentation thus aims to identify the consequences of the current level of awareness for the proposed ethical and legal frameworks for artificial intelligence.

11.20-12.00 Lunch time

Track 2. Automation Tools for Public Radio

12.00
Barbora Hladká, Radek Mařík
Charles University, Czech Technical University
Detection of attribution in Czech news
Our talk focuses on detection of citation sources in the Czech articles published on the iRozhlas news server of Czech public radio. In particular, we present the corpus SiR 1.0 of manually recognized sources and their sentence context in 1,718 iRozhlas articles. In addition, we present a very first version of data mining procedure to detect citation sources automatically.

12.30
Jan Drchal
AI Center, Czech Technical University in Prague
Assistive Tools for Journalists: Applications of Modern Natural Language Processing Methods.
We overview several AI-based assistive tools for journalists developed at Artificial Intelligence Center at Czech Technical University in Prague. Namely, we will discuss the following: 1) the advances of the automated fact-checking tool, 2) meural models for the classification of media bias, and 3) text clustering tools applied to Twitter data. Show more →

We give an overview of the updated state of the AI-based automated fact-checking project aimed at the Czech language. The task is to evaluate textual claims with respect to the ground truth document database. The system’s expected output is one of the three categories: the claim may be supported, refuted, or there is not enough information to decide. In the case of the former two outcomes, the output is further augmented by a selection of documents providing evidence. The claim has a form of a single sentence typically. Our ground truth database is based on the Czech News Agency archive of roughly 2 million 2000-2020 articles.

We have developed a neural classification model for media bias. Here we present an overview of types of media bias as well as statistics obtained by application of the model to a database of news articles from selected Czech news outlets. 

Finally, we discuss and demonstrate tool prototypes aimed at clustering textual data and visualization of extracted clusters. We show examples on Twitter datasets.

13.00
Jiří Špaček
Czech Radio
Automation in Czech Radio, the road to a robotic announcer/presenter
The use of artificial intelligence in Czech Radio and the road to the audioversum.

13.30
Martin Čmejrek
The Mama AI
 How can AI help you?
Practical AI usecases for business and leisure: semantic search (mSearch), neural text-to-speech (mVoice), content classification and recommendation (mNLP).

14.00 End of conference

Basic information

Conference title: Automation of sources in journalistic discourse - examples of good practice
Date: Thursday 27th October 2022
Time: 9.00–14.00 CET.
Place: Zoom and Czech Radio, Vinohradská 12, Prague.
Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JFumQZhVTVmadcX9YpjTTQ
Organizer: FSV UK, Czech Radio
Web: www.signalasum.cz
Project: The Signal and the Noise in the Era of Journalism 5.0
Partners: Český rozhlas, FSV UK, ČVUT, MFF UK, TAČR

Previous conference

Signál a šum, 3. prosince 2021

Registration

Online: Zoom on this zoom link. Or copy this URL to your browser: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JFumQZhVTVmadcX9YpjTTQ
In-person: Czech Radio, Vinohradská st. 12, Prague 2