Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation

Dahyun Lee, Jiyoung Han, Kunwoo Park


Abstract
Article-level news stance detection aims to identify the perspective of news articles toward social issues. Despite advances in stance detection and its importance for trustworthy media environments, news articles pose distinct challenges because their stances are often implicit, subtly conveyed through journalistic framing, and embedded in long, structurally complex texts. To address these challenges, we introduce VFStance, which leverages visual framing to make implicit stance cues more explicit via image generation. In evaluation experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VFStance over existing methods and the contribution of visual framing to its performance. Finally, a controlled user study (N=200) in a snippet-based news consumption setting further demonstrates that VFStance can make stance signals visually salient and highlights its potential use beyond automated stance detection.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2524
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57393–57418
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2524/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dahyun Lee, Jiyoung Han, and Kunwoo Park. 2026. Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 57393–57418, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation (Lee et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2524.pdf