Joint topic modeling for event summarization across news and social media streams

Social media streams such as Twitter are regarded as faster first-hand sources of information generated by massive users. The content diffused through this channel, although noisy, provides important complement and sometimes even a substitute to the traditional news media reporting. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach based on topic modeling to summarize trending subjects by jointly discovering the representative and complementary information from news and tweets. Our method captures the content that enriches the subject matter by reinforcing the identification of complementary sentence-tweet pairs. To valuate the complementarity of a pair, we leverage topic modeling formalism by combining a two-dimensional topic-aspect model and a cross-collection approach in the multi-document summarization literature. The final summaries are generated by co-ranking the news sentences and tweets in both sides simultaneously. Experiments give promising results as compared to state-of-the-art baselines.