📰 Uwazi: Multi-Perspective News Extension

Uwazi is a Chrome extension and web application that reveals multiple perspectives on news articles, empowering users to detect media framing, semantic differences, and hidden biases across local and international news sources.

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🚀 Features

• 🔎 Semantic Comparison: Uses NLP to compare articles covering the same topic from different sources.
• 🌍 Kenyan & International Coverage: Fetches news from Nation, BBC, Al Jazeera, and more.
• 💡 Perspective Insights: Shows key differences and similarity scores between articles.
• ⚡ Chrome Extension: Analyze any news page instantly in your browser.
• 🌐 Web Application: Dedicated React web interface for deeper analysis.

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📂 Project Structure

uwazi/ ├── backend/ # FastAPI NLP backend ├── extension/ # Chrome extension (React TypeScript) ├── webapp/ # Web application (React TypeScript) └── shared/ # Shared utilities (optional)

🛠️ Installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/uwazi.git
cd uwazi

2. Backend Setup

cd backend
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

or install manually:

pip install fastapi uvicorn beautifulsoup4 nltk spacy sentence-transformers newspaper3k requests
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
python -m nltk.downloader punkt wordnet

Run the backend

uvicorn main:app --reload --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

3. Webapp Setup

cd ../webapp
npm install
npm start

4. Chrome Extension Setup

cd ../extension
npm install
npm run build

Package the Extension

mkdir dist
cp -r build/* dist/
cp public/manifest.json dist/
cd dist
zip -r ../uwazi-extension.zip ./*

5. Load Extension in Chrome

Go to chrome://extensions

Enable Developer Mode

Click Load unpacked

Select the dist folder

🔬 Backend API Overview

Endpoint Method Description /compare GET Returns semantic analysis and differences for articles matching a query.

Example:

GET http://localhost:8000/compare?query=Kenya climate policy

🤝 Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change or enhance.

📌 Future Roadmap

🇰🇪 Add Swahili NLP models for local language analysis.

✨ User feedback system to rate usefulness of perspectives.

📱 Mobile app version for on-the-go analysis.

💼 Premium educator & journalist tools.

🙏 Acknowledgements FastAPI

React

Chakra UI

Newspaper3k