Challenges in Applying Machine Learning to Media Monitoring

The Gorkana Group provides high quality media monitoring services to its clients. This paper describes an ongoing project aimed at increasing the amount of automation in Gorkana Group’s workflow through the application of machine learning and language processing technologies. It is important that Gorkana Group’s clients should have a very high level of confidence that if an article has been published, that is relevant to one of their briefs, then they will be shown the article. However, delivering this high-quality media monitoring service means that humans are having to read through very large quantities of data, only a small portion of which is typically deemed relevant. The challenge being addressed by the work reported in this paper is how to efficiently achieve such high-quality media monitoring in the face of huge increases in the amount of the data that needs to be monitored. This paper discusses some of the findings that have emerged during the early stages of the project. We show that, while machine learning can be applied successfully to this real world business problem, the distinctive constraints of the task give rise to a number of interesting challenges.