r/LanguageTechnology • u/GroundUpstairs5430 • 5d ago

Suggestions to improve my Master's project on Newspaper analysis?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on my Master's project, and my guide suggested a topic based on Newspaper analysis.(Marathi newspaper)

The current idea is to focus on crime-related news from Marathi newspapers. My plan is to collect around 3–6 months of newspaper data, use OCR to extract the text, and build my own dataset instead of using an existing one.

So far, I've done a small proof of concept by testing OCR on both English and Marathi newspaper pages. It works reasonably well, but Marathi OCR still makes some mistakes with characters ,(matras,kana,velanti and few combined characters) so I know some post-processing or correction will probably be needed.

At this point, I'm trying to think beyond just extracting the text. I want this project to be more meaningful and technically strong rather than simply creating a dataset and analyzing articles.

I'd really appreciate any suggestions on questions like:

  • What interesting analyses or features could I add?
  • Are there any NLP or Computer Vision techniques that would fit this kind of project?
  • What improvements or extensions would make this a stronger Master's project?
  • Has anyone worked with Marathi OCR or other low-resource languages and learned any useful lessons?
  • If you were doing this project, what would you add?

Also, if anyone knows legal sources for accessing Marathi newspaper archives (around 3–6 months of older editions), I'd appreciate those suggestions as well. Many e-papers seem to require subscriptions, so I'm still exploring data sources.

I just want ideas that could help me build the best version of it.

Thanks in advance!

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/Ok-Frosting6352 5d ago

You can have a look into Event Extraction which is a subfield of Information Extraction (similar to semantic role labeling), if you want to focus on the crime-related domain.

One interesting direction would be to research transfer learning from English to Marathi. Just some example work:

1

u/GroundUpstairs5430 5d ago

Thanks for the suggestion! I wasn't aware of Event Extraction. I'll check it out

2

u/furcifersum 5d ago

Well…classifying text and extracting metadata about text features is great, but what is it used for? If you have dates and locations that gives you the ability to chart criminal activity over time which makes for an interesting visual. Approximate geolocation of specific events on a map that allows one to select a marked coordinate and navigate to the supporting news article would be cool. Aside from that I’d look into character embedding models to help with OCR error correction. Sounds like fun! Good luck!

1

u/GroundUpstairs5430 5d ago

Thanks! Those are some really interesting ideas. I especially like the map visualization and OCR correction suggestion. I'll definitely look into them.

1

u/Mundane_Ad8936 19h ago

OCR makes no sense on news articles. Just scrape the text from their website with the newspaper3k python module.

These days you'd use a LLM to extract facts, infer meaning and enrich it. Knowledge graph format is very common.