Interview with Cristina Belchin: Transforming the Future of News through AI-Powered Summarization
Cristina Belchin, Head of News and Research at EMIS, has been at the forefront of AI and machine learning for over five years, specializing in leveraging these technologies in our content curation processes. Her team’s mission is to enhance clients' strategic business decisions by delivering better information at every stage.
In this interview, she shares insights into how EMIS is leveraging AI to elevate its news and research offerings.
Cristina, every day, EMIS clients access a massive volume of news content. How has the production and consumption of news changed in recent years?
The way news is produced and consumed has indeed changed dramatically over the first two decades of the 21st century, primarily due to digitalization and economic pressures. We've seen key trends like the growth of online news consumption, the influence of social media, personalized news experiences, and the impact of artificial intelligence shaping the news industry. These trends are defining the development of the industry and driving us to innovate.
Given these changes, how has EMIS addressed the challenges of this evolving news environment?
For us, as a business data platform, this dynamic landscape presented a new challenge: how to unlock the value of data in a continuously evolving news environment, all while managing the shortage of time and the need to analyze large amounts of content. Over the last year, we've taken two big steps to tackle this.
Firstly, to ensure solid news coverage and to catch all important events and facts, we added Open web content to our traditional licensed top news sources. We now web scrape hundreds of thousands of websites—reliable blogs, online media, news outlets—and offer this content as AI-generated insights linked to the original articles. This approach gives our clients access to a vast amount of information in both local languages and English, summarized for easier reading and faster analysis. At the same time, they can always read the original article for more details.
That sounds like a significant enhancement. What’s the second step you’ve taken?
The second step was to adopt an analytical approach to our news offering by leveraging our in-house AI capability, which we call Trending Topics. With Trending Topics, we can identify key events or trends in each industry sector or market in real-time.
Could you explain how the Trending Topics feature works?
Trending Topics is driven by a solution that scans news content and groups articles with similar content and keywords. The technology we use for this grouping is called clustering, an unsupervised machine learning technique that builds clusters based on the connectivity between data points. We use news content in English as well as translated articles from local languages as inputs for the clustering. The content is ML-prefiltered to include only industry- or country-related news.
The clusters that are generated are then reviewed by our content experts to ensure we highlight the key events in the respective country or sector. We believe that the human element in AI-generated content is a critical ingredient for providing high-quality content. On the EMIS platform, these clusters are displayed as Trending Topics on industry and country profile pages, each represented by an LLM-generated label. Trending Topics are available on over 130 industry profile pages and across all country profiles on the EMIS Next platform. Users can filter these topics by keywords or sub-industries and adjust the date range for better results.
What can we expect next for Trending Topics?
This year, we plan to upgrade the Trending Topics feature by adding AI-generated summaries for each topic. These short overviews will be available live as soon as a topic is selected and will help our clients gain insights into the events. By summarizing the trends and events impacting companies and markets, we aim to answer the important questions our clients ask themselves: Why is this happening? What is the impact? Who is involved? How will this affect my business? We believe these summaries will help our users stay ahead in their respective markets and make well-informed decisions.
Learn more about how EMIS applies AI & Machine Learning https://www.emis.com/en/how-we-apply-ai
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About EMIS
EMIS is a leading curator of multi-sector, multi-country research for the world’s fastest-growing markets. We provide a unique combination of research from globally renowned information providers, local and niche specialist sources, our own proprietary analysis, and powerful monitoring and productivity tools. EMIS delivers trustworthy intelligence covering more than 370 industry sectors and 12 million companies across 197 markets – providing everything you need in one place as actionable insights are facilitated by leading technology. EMIS is part of ISI Markets. www.emis.com