Using Go and Python NLTK for News Analysis

I had the opportunity to speak at this year’s GothamGo conference in New York City about a side project I’ve been working on at The New York Times for several years now: Newshound.

Newshound is a breaking news email aggregator that originated at one of the company’s developer events and ended up winning an internal contest in early 2013. Since then, I’ve used the platform as a guinea pig for trying out new technologies. In the latest iteration, I rewrote the core of Newshound with the Go programming language but left an essential piece of software in its original Python implementation. My talk covers the obstacles I had to overcome to complete this recent rewrite.