Context is Key(NMF): Modelling Topical Information Dynamics in Chinese Diaspora Media

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Márton Kardos, Mette Thunø

Abstract:

Does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) interfere with European elections through ethnic Chinese
diaspora media? This question forms the basis of an ongoing research project exploring how PRC nar-
ratives about European elections are represented in Chinese diaspora media, and thus the objectives of
PRC news media manipulation. In order to study diaspora media efÏciently and at scale, it is necessary
to use techniques derived from quantitative text analysis, such as topic modelling. In this paper, we
present a pipeline for studying information dynamics in Chinese media. Firstly, we present KeyNMF,
a new approach to static and dynamic topic modelling using transformer-based contextual embedding
models. We provide benchmark evaluations to demonstrate that our approach is competitive on a num-
ber of Chinese datasets and metrics. Secondly, we integrate KeyNMF with existing methods for de-
scribing information dynamics in complex systems. We apply this pipeline to data from five news sites,
focusing on the period of time leading up to the 2024 European parliamentary elections. Our methods
and results demonstrate the effectiveness of KeyNMF for studying information dynamics in Chinese
media and lay groundwork for further work addressing the broader research questions.