An introduction to the Europe Media Monitor family of applications.

Most large organizations have dedicated departments that monitor the media to keep up-to-date with relevant developments and to keep an eye on how they are represented in the news. Part of this media monitoring work can be automated. In the European Union with its 23 official languages, it is particularly important to cover media reports in many languages in order to capture the complementary news content published in the different countries. It is also important to be able to access the news content across languages and to merge the extracted information. We present here the four publicly accessible systems of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications, which cover between 19 and 50 languages (see http://press.jrc.it/overview.html). We give an overview of their functionality and discuss some of the implications of the fact that they cover quite so many languages. We discuss design issues necessary to be able to achieve this high multilinguality, as well as the benefits of this multilinguality.