Cross-lingual Clustering of News Stories using Embeddings-based Community Detection

Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Kristina Kovacikova, Ion Androutsopoulos


Abstract
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models has accelerated news content generation, yet methods to help readers contextualize and responsibly consume news content lag behind. Existing approaches to clustering news articles face significant limitations. Methods based on dense representations often struggle with robustness and efficiency, while those based on sparse (n-gram) representations are unsuitable for cross-lingual applications. Additionally, LLM-based methods are expensive to apply at the needed scale, restricting their use to only well funded organizations.

We present a novel method for efficient clustering of news articles using cross-lingual, sentence-level embeddings and community detection on similarity graphs. Our method can construct a document-level similarity graph from sentence-level embeddings, avoiding the use of sub-optimal embeddings of entire documents. The proposed method can be executed on consumer hardware, enabling practical news analysis for personal use and research.

We also release a manually curated dataset of clustered news articles, providing a valuable resource for future research. We use the dataset to benchmark our method using nine text embedding models with cross-lingual capability and propose various practical configurations.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.104
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2124–2146
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.104/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Kristina Kovacikova, and Ion Androutsopoulos. 2026. Cross-lingual Clustering of News Stories using Embeddings-based Community Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 2124–2146, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Clustering of News Stories using Embeddings-based Community Detection (Nikolaidis et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.104.pdf