Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu, Lidiya Murakhovs’ka, Xiang Chen, Caiming Xiong


Abstract
There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework’s feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.380
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5180–5194
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.380
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.380
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu, Lidiya Murakhovs’ka, Xiang Chen, and Caiming Xiong. 2022. Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 5180–5194, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage (Laban et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.380.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.380.mp4