The sheer volume and variety of news coverage about the Coronavirus makes it a good test case for Bloomberg’s prototype AI summarization engine.

In the past day Bloomberg has carried 31,000 stories about the pandemic. Given the global nature of the outbreak, there is a wide array of different angles.

The challenge is identifying and ranking the major themes. Bloomberg’s summarization engine (NSTM) takes a simple approach of breaking down the coverage by volume.

The computer generates a short label that appears over representative headlines. Earlier today the five themes were:

California Declares Emergency After Virus Death
Italy to Close Schools as Coronavirus Death Toll
James Bond Film No Time to Die’s Released Postponed
U.S. House Approves Coronavirus Funding Bill
Four More Cases of Coronavirus Confirmed