Context is Key(NMF): Modelling Topical Information Dynamics in Chinese
  Diaspora Media
Authors: name: Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan; name: Rebecca M. M. Hicke; name: Márton Kardos; name: Mette Thunø
Published: 2024-10-16 17:59:52

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 narratives about European elections
are represented in Chinese diaspora media, and thus the objectives of PRC news
media manipulation. In order to study diaspora media efficiently 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 number of Chinese datasets and metrics.
Secondly, we integrate KeyNMF with existing methods for describing 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.