As part of the cooperation with Prof. Dr. Hestermann in the research project Police Press Releases, two of our computational linguists visited Marcomedia University Hamburg with the aim of introducing journalism students to the field of semantic text analysis. The automated processing of large amounts of data offers great potential for journalistic projects, as explained in the lecture using the research project of police press reports as an example: In order to be able to make statements about the origin of persons mentioned in police press reports, the distinction between suspects and victims is central to the quality of the statements. In implementing this distinction, the students actively support LangTec by annotating data sets that are later used to train the machine classification model. The seminar concludes with a lively discussion about difficulties and requirements for high-quality annotations and future uses of semantic text analysis.

The report of the Marcomedia University can be read here.