Content-driven, unsupervised clustering of news articles through multiscale graph partitioning

Abstract: The explosion in the amount of news and journalistic content being generated across the globe, coupled with extended and instantaneous access to information through online media, makes it difficult and time-consuming to monitor news developments and opinion formation in real time. There is an increasing need for tools that can pre-process, analyse and classify raw text to extract interpretable content; specifically, identifying topics and content-driven groupings of articles. We present here such a methodology that brings together powerful vector embeddings from Natural Language Processing with tools from Graph Theory that exploit diffusive dynamics on graphs to reveal natural partitions across scales. Our framework uses a recent deep neural network text analysis methodology (Doc2vec) to represent text in vector form and then applies a multi-scale community detection method (Markov Stability) to partition a similarity graph of document vectors. The method allows us to obtain clusters of documents with similar content, at different levels of resolution, in an unsupervised manner. We showcase our approach with the analysis of a corpus of 9,000 news articles published by Vox Media over one year. Our results show consistent groupings of documents according to content without a priori assumptions about the number or type of clusters to be found. The multilevel clustering reveals a quasi-hierarchy of topics and subtopics with increased intelligibility and improved topic coherence as compared to external taxonomy services and standard topic detection methods.