Unified Representation of Twitter and Online News Using Graph and Entities

Abstract

To improve consumer engagement and satisfaction, online news services employ strategies for personalizing and recommending articles to their users based on their interests. In addition to news agencies’ own digital platforms, they also leverage social media to reach out to a broad user base. These engagement efforts are often disconnected with each other, but present a compelling opportunity to incorporate engagement data from social media to inform their digital news platform and vice-versa, leading to a more personalized experience for users. While this idea seems intuitive, there are several challenges due to the disparate nature of the two sources. In this paper, we propose a model to build a generalized graph of news articles and tweets that can be used for different downstream tasks such as identifying sentiment, trending topics, and misinformation, as well as sharing relevant articles on social media in a timely fashion. We evaluate our framework on a downstream task of identifying related pairs of news articles and tweets with promising results. The content unification problem addressed by our model is not unique to the domain of news, and thus can be applicable to other problems linking different content platforms.