How the world views itself?

• Main Author: Ramakrishnan Vrajaraj
• Other Authors: Sharad Sinha
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information systems applications
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70299
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

By covering news, politics, weather, sports, entertainment, and significant events, the daily media shape the dominant cultural, social and political picture of society. With the increase in development and influence of countries across the world, there has been a significant rise in independent news sources globally in the 20th century. These sources prioritize on reporting of local news extensively due to on-the-ground coverage, thereby informing the public of events happening in their region or country. However, reporting of international news by a local news source is still limited to a certain extent as it does not have the entire resources to position itself in the best manner to collate and report news occurring in another region or country. With increasing globalization, the average news reader has felt the need to be more informed and opinionated about events happening around the world without compromising on convenience. The rise of Internet journalism has paved the way for the average news reader to access news sources from other regions. In recent years, the blogosphere has taken reporting a step further, mining down to the experiences and perceptions of individual citizens. On the other hand, some of the largest newspaper circulations are in the region’s local languages, while some regions do not have English-language news sources. Consequently, it is challenging for an average English-speaking news reader to understand events happening in another region unless the local language is known. This project aims to resolve the linguistic barrier in accessibility to international journalism by building a web application that retrieves news from various countries according to the user’s preference and translates them to English. Furthermore, the application utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify trending topics in these countries and offer compelling visualizations that provide a holistic and unbiased overview of events happening and issues concerning these countries. Thus, this application aims to resolve linguistic and cultural barriers that news readers face and improve the perception that surrounds global events to a more balanced and wider one.