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Innovation tracker | Issue 1 | 31 Mar 2019
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EULE Media Monitor. © Austrian Parliament

Innovation Tracker, Issue 1, 31 March 2019

The EULE Media Monitor / 360°Topic-Monitoring has been developed by the Austrian Parliamentary Administration. It helps parliamentarians to stay up-to-date, delivering information in an easy-to-access web-based format.

It has become increasingly difficult both to be accurately informed and to avoid being drowned in a flood of questionable social media content, various news sources and unmanageable professional data. Parliamentarians are particularly dependent on reliable information, which parliamentary research services try to provide in this challenging context.

Therefore, a whole team within the Austrian Legal, Legislative and Research Service has been dedicated to “separating the music from the noise” by finding, filtering and visualizing content relevant to parliamentarians. The EULE Media Monitor saves members of parliament time and resources by displaying analyses (such as top topics and influencers) of social media, news and broader expert research, sorted by different policy areas.

The team deals with thousands of articles and data sets every day, both manually and automatically. By not representing specific interests or agendas, it follows a strict non-partisan rule in the information it provides to MPs. This makes it easier for parliamentarians to quickly grasp connections between what journalists, experts and citizens are saying.

The Secretary General of the Austrian Parliament, Harald Dossi, notes the importance of the new system: "Parliament, as the people's representative, must always have the information that it needs available at the right time."

After an exceedingly successful launch in 2017, the system is now being evaluated for further development, using AI-based concepts like auto-abstracting and content-matching. This should not only extend the breadth and depth of what is available, but also achieve a fully optimized, customer-oriented presentation of very diverse data.

#quickfacts

  • The sheer volume of information available means that we need to make use of every advantage that automated processes can offer.
  • The enormous potential of AI technologies must be of special interest to those processing information for the purposes of accurate knowledge transfer.

For more information contact: 
Peter Reichstaedter [email protected] +43 676 8900 2820
Romana Lanzerstorfer [email protected] +43 676 8900 2404.

Source: Austrian Parliament