News professionals are facing the challenge of discovering news from more diverse and unreliable information in the age of social media. More and more news events break on social media first and are picked up by news media subsequently. The recent Brussels attack is such an example. At Reuters, a global news agency, we have observed the necessity of providing a more effective tool that can help our journalists to quickly discover news on social media, verify them and then inform the public.

A major problem facing online information services is how to index and supplement large document collections with respect to a rich set of categories. We focus upon the routing of case law summaries to various secondary law volumes in which they should be cited. Given the large number (> 13,000) of closely related categories, this is a challenging task that is unlikely to succumb to a single algorithmic solution. Our fully implemented and recently deployed system shows that a superior classification engine for this task can be constructed from a combination of classifiers. The multi-classifier approach helps us leverage all the relevant textual features and meta data, and appears to generalize to related classification tasks.

We describe a system that processes court opinions and retrieves related cases from a citator database, so that new cases can be linked to earlier ones that they impact. The design of the system combines information extraction, information retrieval and machine learning techniques in a novel way. The fully implemented program is capable of performing prior case retrieval at human levels of recall and acceptable levels of precision.