The first year of the ongoing international project XLike is over. The project partners developed the first prototype tool, which is now also publicly available at Sandbox.
The first prototype of the XLike tool is designed as a tool for automatic cross-lingual searching for the top entities and top stories in the news feed from all around the world (the news feed includes a few thousand news sites in different languages). At the moment the tool supports 4 languages (English, German, Spanish, Chinese). In the future it will include also several other languages, like Catalan, Slovenian, Croatian etc.
The tool enables users to adjust the search by time period of the published articles, language of the news articles and home country of the publisher. The results are visualized in following sections: list of top entities, list of matching articles, list of top stories, news map, time distribution of the articles, graph of the distribution of the articles by publishers, graph of the distribution of the articles per language ant a keyword cloud for related keywords.
This means that users are able to find out for example the hottest entities for last 24 hours all around the world. Other possible uses of the tool are for instance searching top stories in a selected country in a selected time period or searching top stories about a selected entity or keyword in selected languages. The results are cross-lingual meaning that the search for English keyword “flood” includes also results for the same keyword in other languages. Articles are also automatically connected to similar articles from other articles.
