FrenchNews-7: Benchmarking Cross-Publisher French News Editorial Desk Classification

Abstract

We present FrenchNews-7, a cross-publisher France-based French-language news editorial desk classification benchmark combining a large multi-outlet corpus, a URL-derived seven-class taxonomy, and a fine-tuned CamemBERT classifier. Labels are assigned via a hybrid pipeline combining publisher URL slugs with LLM annotation for structurally ambiguous cases, audited through an inter-rater study (2 humans + 2 LLMs; pairwise $κ\geq 0.766$, human--human $κ= 0.806$). We evaluate lexical, multilingual, and French-specific trained classifiers under both in-distribution and held-out-publisher settings, with additional comparison against zero-shot LLM baselines (GPT-OSS-120B, Mistral Small 3.2, Llama-3.3-70B) on the held-out pool. The strongest model, CamemBERT-base on full article text, outperforms headline-only input, generalizes to unseen outlets, and exceeds all three zero-shot LLM baselines on overall recall (0.799), with the gap concentrated in the ambiguous editorial-boundary categories Economie and Societe. Cross-publisher evaluation reveals uneven boundary stability: Sport, Culture & Loisirs, and International transfer cleanly, while Economie (recall = 0.517) is close to blinded human agreement (0.55), and Societe (precision = 0.577) absorbs boundary ambiguity, both suggesting editorial conventions rather than recoverable classifier headroom. The fine-tuned CamemBERT-base model, labeled manifest, reference collection scripts, and a reliability-tier guidance table are available at https://huggingface.co/LeFrenchNewsLab/camembert-base-frenchnews7 (model) and https://huggingface.co/datasets/LeFrenchNewsLab/frenchnews-7 (dataset).