Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia

Farhan Samir, Chan Young Park, Anjalie Field, Vered Shwartz, Yulia Tsvetkov


Abstract
To explain social phenomena and identify systematic biases, much research in computational social science focuses on comparative text analyses. These studies often rely on coarse corpus-level statistics or local word-level analyses, mainly in English. We introduce the InfoGap method—an efficient and reliable approach to locating information gaps and inconsistencies in articles at the fact level, across languages. We evaluate InfoGap by analyzing LGBT people’s portrayals, across 2.7K biography pages on English, Russian, and French Wikipedias. We find large discrepancies in factual coverage across the languages. Moreover, our analysis reveals that biographical facts carrying negative connotations are more likely to be highlighted in Russian Wikipedia. Crucially, InfoGap both facilitates large scale analyses, and pinpoints local document- and fact-level information gaps, laying a new foundation for targeted and nuanced comparative language analysis at scale.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.384
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6747–6762
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.384
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.384
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Farhan Samir, Chan Young Park, Anjalie Field, Vered Shwartz, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2024. Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6747–6762, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia (Samir et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.384.pdf