Political perspective detection has become an increasingly important task that can help combat echo chambers and political polarization. Previous approaches generally focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. In light of these limitations, we propose KCD, a political perspective detection approach to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporate textual cues as paragraph-level labels. Specifically, we firstly generate random walks on external knowledge graphs and infuse them with news text representations. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to jointly model news content as well as semantic, syntactic and entity cues in news articles. Finally, we adopt relational graph neural networks for graph-level representation learning and conduct political perspective detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We further examine the effect of knowledge walks and textual cues and how they contribute to our approach’s data efficiency.

Text classification is a critical research topic with broad applications in natural language processing. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention in the research community and demonstrated their promising results on this canonical task. Despite the success, their performance could be largely jeopardized in practice since they are: (1) unable to capture high-order interaction between words; (2) inefficient to handle large datasets and new documents. To address those issues, in this paper, we propose a principled model – hypergraph attention networks (HyperGAT), which can obtain more expressive power with less computational consumption for text representation learning. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on the text classification task.