Bringing more text analytics to the Bing News Solution Template
We are excited to announce support for ‘bring your own entities’ for the Bing News solution template! The Bing News template allows brand managers to find articles most relevant to them by filtering on sentiment, trending topics as well as entities like locations, organizations and people (learn more about the Bing News template).
One of the most common feature requests we received was the ability to define your own list of words and use that to slice your data. A product manager may want to e.g. create a list of products or company names and use that to discover and read relevant articles. Read on to find out how you can incorporate your own entities into the news template today!
Setting up the Solution
Navigate to our installer to get started with setting up the Bing News template. Upon reaching the entities page you are now given the option of bringing your own entities. Selecting ‘Yes’ will take you to the entities definition page.
You can define entities in two ways – either by uploading your entities or inputting entities directly inside the experience. In this example, I am setting up a solution that will help me find articles related to the Microsoft brand. I have defined a list of Microsoft products I want to follow. I choose to upload entities and point the installer to a CSV on my computer.
This auto populates my ‘Product entity’ which I can now customize by tweaking the list as well as changing the icon and color associated with it.
I can now continue adding as many entities as I would like. In this example, I have added another entity for other tech companies I may want to track in conjunction to Microsoft:
Once I am happy with all the new entities I have created I can click ‘Next’ and carry on setting up the solution.
The end result
Once the template is set up, you can start exploring your reports! You will notice that the Overview page now has both the out of the box entities (like Location) along with your newly added entities (in my case Products and Tech Companies). Selecting something like Google from the companies list will show me all the articles that mention Microsoft and Google together, for whatever date range, news category or sentiment type I am interested in.
Customizing your entities
Once your template is set up you can always go back and add new entities or modify the current ones. Currently this can be done by directly modifying the “userdefinedentitydefinitions” table inside your Azure SQL database.
Try it out & let us know
Go ahead and check out the Bing News solution template. You can try out an interactive sample report, watch a demo video or just go ahead and set things up! The team is always interested in any thoughts or feedback – you can reach us through our alias (pbisolntemplates@microsoft.com) or by leaving a comment on the Power BI Solution Template Community page.
