Papers for
media analysis teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Reconstructed GDELT news records match original data with varying accuracy
Agreement Between Reconstructed and Native GDELT GKG Records: A Field-Level Baseline
Abstract: The Global Knowledge Graph (GKG) of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) characterizes news articles using named entities, topics, quantitative and temporal features, quotations, tone, and dictionary-based content measures. Its codebook defines the record format, but the software that produces the records is not public, so researchers cannot generate compatible records for articles they collect themselves. We built an open-source reconstruction, gdelt-regkg, and measured how closely it agrees with GDELT's archived (native) records for 193,550 English articles from 8,729 publishers (2020-2025) and 2,500 articles in five other languages. Agreement depends strongly on the field. English tone, the percentage of positive minus negative words, has a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.79 points and a concordance correlation coefficient of 0.75. Identity agreement (F1) is 0.65 for persons, 0.42 for organizations, and 0.65 for locations. It is lower for date components (0.42), complete counts with their objects and locations (0.07), and quotations (0.07), while GCAM category presence reaches micro F1 0.84 within the implemented dictionaries. In subsets where retrieved and native titles and lengths match, tone error falls to 1.47 and organization F1 rises to 0.48, yet most disagreement remains. A larger gazetteer raises coverage of native places from 89.5% to 97.1% with little change in location F1. Tone computed on English translations of non-English articles is less accurate (MAE 2.10-2.64) than for English articles. The results are conditional on article pages that could still be retrieved, and the correspondence subsets do not isolate the effect of input differences. Reconstructed records should therefore be assessed field by field and not treated as completely interchangeable with native ones.
Leap retrieves key evidence for long audio video questions
LEAP: Learned Block-wise Evidence Retrieval for Long Audio-Video Perception
Abstract: Hour-scale audio-visual question answering is constrained by a context dilemma: dense whole-recording encoding rapidly exhausts context limits, whereas uniform temporal compression severely dilutes fine-grained acoustic and visual evidence. We introduce LEAP, a framework where the model retrieves its own evidence without placing the whole recording in one context. LEAP divides a recording into fixed-duration blocks, applying a lightweight localization pass to each block to score short candidate windows. The highest-ranked windows are pooled and re-encoded in a single bounded answer pass. Consequently, the answer input and peak context remain independent of the recording duration. By decoupling evidence localization from reasoning, our framework can localize candidate temporal windows over pre-computed transcripts without decoding media frames, while preserving fine-grained visual and non-speech evidence by routing the final answering pass over raw audio-visual streams. LEAP trains both stages: a localization LoRA improves the selected windows, and an answer LoRA improves the answers read from the same windows. The block grid natively supports causal queries, enabling LEAP to support streaming inference without streaming-specific training. Across several AVQA benchmarks, LEAP improves over the Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B baseline by 4.5-16.8%, and transfers to a second omni-modal backbone, MiniCPM-o 4.5, surpassing its published results by 3.1-13.0%.