EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles

Yuanyuan Lei, Md Messal Monem Miah, Ayesha Qamar, Sai Ramana Reddy, Jonathan Tong, Haotian Xu, Ruihong Huang


Abstract
Most previous research on moral frames has focused on social media short texts, little work has explored moral sentiment within news articles. In news articles, authors often express their opinions or political stance through moral judgment towards events, specifically whether the event is right or wrong according to social moral rules. This paper initiates a new task to understand moral opinions towards events in news articles. We have created a new dataset, EMONA, and annotated event-level moral opinions in news articles. This dataset consists of 400 news articles containing over 10k sentences and 45k events, among which 9,613 events received moral foundation labels. Extracting event morality is a challenging task, as moral judgment towards events can be very implicit. Baseline models were built for event moral identification and classification. In addition, we also conduct extrinsic evaluations to integrate event-level moral opinions into three downstream tasks. The statistical analysis and experiments show that moral opinions of events can serve as informative features for identifying ideological bias or subjective events.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.293
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5239–5251
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.293
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanyuan Lei, Md Messal Monem Miah, Ayesha Qamar, Sai Ramana Reddy, Jonathan Tong, Haotian Xu, and Ruihong Huang. 2024. EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5239–5251, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles (Lei et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.293.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.293.copyright.pdf