How Quartz used AI to help reporters search the Mauritius Leaks | QUARTZ


AI aided the investigation by applying a journalist’s human judgment identifying a particular kind of document—like a tax return or a business plan—across the entire document trove.’ 

A cache of documents came from a Mauritius law firm about tax avoidance schemes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, via a whistle blower. QUARTZ explains how they used machine learning to identify which of 200,000 documents were worthy of a closer look.

  • How they did it – A machine learning model was trained to find similarities in the documents, involving about 13 hours of training on a MacBook Pro.
  • How they measured success – Finding relevant documents that otherwise wouldn’t have been identified (they couldn’t determine if they found all of them)
  • Hurdle one: Training computers on secret documents – Overcoming the challenge of labelling when secrecy meant they couldn’t use 3rd party help.
  • Hurdle two: Documents within documents – Standardizing analysis when the source material is in different formats.

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How Quartz used AI to help reporters search the Mauritius Leaks
QUARTZ | July 23, 2019 |by Jeremy B. Merrill

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