Abstract

News media outlets disseminate information across various platforms. Often, these posts present complementary content and perspectives on the same news story. However, to compile a set of related news articles, users must thoroughly scour multiple sources and platforms, manually identifying which publications pertain to the same story. This tedious process hinders the speed at which journalists can perform essential tasks, notably fact-checking. To tackle this problem, we created a dataset containing both related and unrelated news pairs. This dataset allows us to develop information retrieval models grounded in the principle of binary relevance. Recognizing that many Transformer-based models might be suited for this task but could overemphasize relationships based on lexical connections, we tailored a dataset to fine-tune these models to focus on semantically relevant connections in the news domain. To craft this dataset, we introduced a methodology to identify pairs of news stories that are lexically similar yet refer to different events and pairs that discuss the same event but have distinct lexical structures. This design compels Transformers to recognize semantic connections between stories, even when their lexical similarities might be absent. Following a human-annotation assessment, we reveal that BERT outperformed other techniques, excelling even in challenging test cases. To ensure the reproducibility of our approach, we have made the dataset and top-performing models publicly available.