What are entities?
Entities are the things you write about — people, places, companies or organizations automatically-detected in your stories.
How are entities different from topics and other content categories?
You might consider entities similar to keywords. Unlike beat-level or site-section topics, entities include the names of people and public officials, places, companies, organizations or groups featured in each story.
Where will I see entities?
Entities will show up in your Trends box on the left hand side of your dashboards as "Detected Entities". You’ll be able to see how many stories included that entity and if you click on the bubble you can filter your data to see those stories specifically.
Entities also appear in the About This Story box on the dashboard for any individual story. You will see which entities were detected in that story, and how popular each one was. From there, you can inspect all the stories about an individual entity more deeply.
How are entities detected in stories?
Entities are identified automatically by Metrics for News. We use machine learning and natural-language processing to analyze the text of each story, and we identify the unique set of people, places, or organizations that are a significant focus of the story.