Learning Unbiased News Article Representations: A Knowledge-Infused
  Approach
Sadia Kamal Jimmy Hartford Jeremy Willis Arunkumar Bagavathi
Quantification of the political leaning of online news articles can aid in
understanding the dynamics of political ideology in social groups and measures
to mitigating them. However, predicting the accurate political leaning of a
news article with machine learning models is a challenging task. This is due to
(i) the political ideology of a news article is defined by several factors, and
(ii) the innate nature of existing learning models to be biased with the
political bias of the news publisher during the model training. There is only a
limited number of methods to study the political leaning of news articles which
also do not consider the algorithmic political bias which lowers the
generalization of machine learning models to predict the political leaning of
news articles published by any new news publishers. In this work, we propose a
knowledge-infused deep learning model that utilizes relatively reliable
external data resources to learn unbiased representations of news articles
using their global and local contexts. We evaluate the proposed model by
setting the data in such a way that news domains or news publishers in the test
set are completely unseen during the training phase. With this setup we show
that the proposed model mitigates algorithmic political bias and outperforms
baseline methods to predict the political leaning of news articles with up to
73% accuracy.