Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval

Yixuan Tang, Yuanyuan Shi, Yiqun Sun, Anthony Kum Hoe Tung


Abstract
Access to diverse perspectives is essential for understanding real-world events, yet most news retrieval systems prioritize textual relevance, leading to redundant results and limited viewpoint exposure. We propose NEWSCOPE, a two-stage framework for diverse news retrieval that enhances event coverage by explicitly modeling semantic variation at the sentence level. The first stage retrieves topically relevant content using dense retrieval, while the second stage applies sentence-level clustering and diversity-aware re-ranking to surface complementary information. To evaluate retrieval diversity, we introduce three interpretable metrics, namely Average Pairwise Distance, Positive Cluster Coverage, and Information Density Ratio, and construct two paragraph-level benchmarks: LocalNews and DSGlobal. Experiments show that NEWSCOPE consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving significantly higher diversity without compromising relevance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-grained, interpretable modeling in mitigating redundancy and promoting comprehensive event understanding. The data and code are available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/NEWSCOPE.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1722
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33927–33945
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1722/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixuan Tang, Yuanyuan Shi, Yiqun Sun, and Anthony Kum Hoe Tung. 2025. Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 33927–33945, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval (Tang et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1722.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1722.checklist.pdf