MultiLayerET: A Unified Representation of Entities and Topics Using Multilayer Graphs

Jumanah Alshehri, Marija Stanojevic, Parisa Khan, Benjamin Rapp, Eduard C. Dragut, Zoran Obradovic

Abstract: Many online news outlets, forums, and blogs provide a rich stream of publications and user comments. This rich body of data is a valuable source of information for researchers, journalists, and policymakers. However, the ever-increasing production and user engagement rate make it difficult to analyze this data without automated tools. This work presents MultiLayerET, a method to unify the representation of entities and topics in articles and comments. In MultiLayerET, articles’ content and associated comments are parsed into a multilayer graph consisting of heterogeneous nodes representing named entities and news topics. The nodes within this graph have attributed edges denoting weight, i.e., the strength of the connection between the two nodes, time, i.e., the co-occurrence contemporaneity of two nodes, and sentiment, i.e., the opinion (in aggregate) of an entity toward a topic. Such information helps in analyzing articles and their comments. We infer the edges connecting two nodes using information mined from the textual data. The multilayer representation gives an advantage over a single-layer representation since it integrates articles and comments via shared topics and entities, providing richer signal points about emerging events. MultiLayerET can be applied to different downstream tasks, such as detecting media bias and misinformation. To explore the efficacy of the proposed method, we apply MultiLayerET to a body of data gathered from six representative online news outlets. We show that with MultiLayerET, the classification F1 score of a media bias prediction model improves by $$36\%$$ , and that of a state-of-the-art fake news detection model improves by $$4\%$$ .