Unified analysis of streaming news.

ABSTRACTNews clustering, categorization and analysis are key components of any news portal. They require algorithms capable of dealing with dynamic data to cluster, interpret and to temporally aggregate news articles. These three tasks are often solved separately. In this paper we present a unified framework to group incoming news articles into temporary but tightly-focused storylines, to identify prevalent topics and key entities within these stories, and to reveal the temporal structure of stories as they evolve. We achieve this by building a hybrid clustering and topic model. To deal with the available wealth of data we build an efficient parallel inference algorithm by sequential Monte Carlo estimation. Time and memory costs are nearly constant in the length of the history, and the approach scales to hundreds of thousands of documents. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy on the publicly available TDT dataset and data of a major internet news site.