Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing

Lea Frermann, Jiatong Li, Shima Khanehzar, Gosia Mikolajczak


Abstract
Despite increasing interest in the automatic detection of media frames in NLP, the problem is typically simplified as single-label classification and adopts a topic-like view on frames, evading modelling the broader document-level narrative. In this work, we revisit a widely used conceptualization of framing from the communication sciences which explicitly captures elements of narratives, including conflict and its resolution, and integrate it with the narrative framing of key entities in the story as heroes, victims or villains. We adapt an effective annotation paradigm that breaks a complex annotation task into a series of simpler binary questions, and present an annotated data set of English news articles, and a case study on the framing of climate change in articles from news outlets across the political spectrum. Finally, we explore automatic multi-label prediction of our frames with supervised and semi-supervised approaches, and present a novel retrieval-based method which is both effective and transparent in its predictions. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities and challenges for future work on document-level models of narrative framing.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.486
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8712–8732
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.486
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.486
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lea Frermann, Jiatong Li, Shima Khanehzar, and Gosia Mikolajczak. 2023. Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8712–8732, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing (Frermann et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.486.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.486.mp4