Why is That a Background Article

Abstract

News background linking is the problem of finding online resources that can provide valuable context and background information to help the reader comprehend a given news article. While the problem has recently attracted several researchers, however, the notion of background relevance is not well-studied and it requires better understanding to ensure effective system performance. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis on a sample of 25 query news articles and 152 of their corresponding background articles, in addition to 50 of non-background ones. The goal of the study is to shed some light on the relationship between the query articles and the background articles, and provide informative insights for developing more effective background retrieval models. For instance, our analysis shows that event-driven query articles are, on average, harder to process than others, hence they should be handled differently. It also shows that discussing subtopics in detail and adding new informative topics are both essential factors for highly-relevant background articles. Moreover, it shows that a high lexical similarity between a query article and a background one is neither sufficient nor necessary. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Retrieval tasks and goals; Specialized information retrieval.

Unsupervised query reduction for efficient yet effective news background linking

“…It may be a feature article discussing a general topic, e.g ., an article discussing the increase of college fees and its effects on the education process in the country. For such articles, event or story detection will not help ( Essam & Elsayed, 2020 ). Furthermore, in some cases, an article that does not mention the event of the query article might be a strong background article that helps the reader contextualize the event.…”