Speaker Mining -- FAIR Data on Public Broadcasts for Question Answering

Public broadcasts are at the center of civic discourse: Traditional television talk shows, alongside emerging podcast and web video formats, capture and guide the attention of our societies, shaping how citizens encounter politics, science, and societal issues. Yet, systematic or even simple analyses of these formats face similar challenges: guest and content metadata are scarce, fleeting, fragmented, and not standardized. Research conducted and questions answered are based on extensive, laborious, yet isolated data-curation efforts that capture only a fraction of the relevant landscape. This work seeks to address this issue using a scaling-oriented framework for FAIR data curation in public broadcasting. Evaluated on 15 broadcasting programs, the pipeline aggregates ZDF Archive PDFs, fernsehserien.de, and Wikidata into a unified knowledge graph. Of the 31,817 candidate guest mentions from these three sources, 17,729 could be automatically disambiguated, further 5,958 via 64 hours of manual reconciling using OpenRefine. Results are published at speakermining.wikibase.cloud and linked to Wikidata, enabling SPARQL-based question answering based on gender, age, occupation, or institutional affiliation across 8,436 canonical persons with 23,527 appearances in 6,469 aligned episodes. Our iterative experience reveals that correctly disambiguating and deduplicating speaker data from heterogeneous sources demands dedicated effort on sustainable infrastructure. For scalable and reliable question answering on public broadcasts to be accessible to everyone, we recommend fostering the potential of linked open data: Advancing alignment and utilization approaches like this work, particularly towards crowdsourced development and curation, but also more FAIR data interfaces from public broadcast service providers.

Tim Wittenborg, Omar Imad Remmo, Claudia Frick, Lena John, Oliver Karras, Sören Auer · 2026