Why does the president tweet this? Discovering reasons and contexts for politicians’ tweets from news articles

Abstract

Politicians’ tweets can have important political and economic implications. However, limited context makes it hard for readers to instantly and precisely understand them, especially from a causal perspective. The triggers for these tweets may have been reported in news prior to the tweets, but simply finding similar news articles would not serve the purpose, given the following reasons. First, readers may only be interested in finding the reasons and contexts (we call causal backgrounds) for a certain part of a tweet. Intuitively, such content would be politically relevant and accord with public’s recent attention, which is not usually reflected within the context. Besides, the content should be human-readable, while the noisy and informal nature of tweets hinders regular Open Information Extraction systems. Second, similarity does not capture causality and the causality between tweet contents and news contents is beyond the scopes of causality extraction tools. Meanwhile, it will be non-trivial to construct a high-quality tweet-to-intent dataset.We propose the first end-to-end framework for discovering causal backgrounds of politicians’ tweets by: 1. Designing an Open IE system considering rule-free representations for tweets; 2. Introducing sources like Wikipedia linkage and edit history to identify focal contents; 3. Finding implicit causalities between different contexts using explicit causalities learned elsewhere. We curate a comprehensive dataset of interpretations from political journalists for 533 tweets from 5 US politicians. On average, we obtain the correct answers within top-2 recommendations. We make our dataset and framework code publicly available.