News

Evidence

Agency credits in bylines and credit lines; sentences copied word for word from wire copy or another outlet; embedded posts; and sources named in the text (“wie Reuters berichtete”, “told the BBC”, “said on X”), found by rules for German, English and French plus a name tagger.

Linking facts

Two sentences from different outlets state the same fact when they are each other’s best match between their articles and their similarity is at least 0.825 (multilingual paraphrase model). On 150 hand-labelled pairs that gives precision 0.89 and recall 0.65. The two articles must also be alike as wholes (the mean of their sentences, similarity at least 0.6), so a generic sentence (“Die Ermittlungen dauern an.”) does not tie two different stories. A fact holds at most one sentence per article.

Events: articles that share two or more facts report the same story; communities of such articles (Louvain) form an event of at least two facts, titled after its earliest article. Set phrases that outlets repeat from story to story and pages that collect several stories (“die neusten Meldungen”) tie no articles.

Named sources

On held-out hand-labelled sentences: precision 0.83, recall 0.64. Agencies, outlets and platforms are the most reliable types. A pronoun speaker (“she said”) is not resolved to a name.

Limits

Wire use is a lower bound: there is no AFP, PA or full Reuters/AP/SDA text. FT, NYT and Bloomberg give headlines and teasers only. Times are publication times; an updated article keeps its first time, so “first retrieved” is approximate.