Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Its Application to Analyzing News Framing Trends Surrounding U.S. Gun Violence

Siyi Liu, Lei Guo, Kate Mays, Margrit Betke, Derry Tanti Wijaya


Abstract
Different news articles about the same topic often offer a variety of perspectives: an article written about gun violence might emphasize gun control, while another might promote 2nd Amendment rights, and yet a third might focus on mental health issues. In communication research, these different perspectives are known as “frames”, which, when used in news media will influence the opinion of their readers in multiple ways. In this paper, we present a method for effectively detecting frames in news headlines. Our training and performance evaluation is based on a new dataset of news headlines related to the issue of gun violence in the United States. This Gun Violence Frame Corpus (GVFC) was curated and annotated by journalism and communication experts. Our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art performance for multiclass news frame detection, significantly outperforming a recent baseline by 35.9% absolute difference in accuracy. We apply our frame detection approach in a large scale study of 88k news headlines about the coverage of gun violence in the U.S. between 2016 and 2018.
Anthology ID:
K19-1047
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
504–514
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1047
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1047
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siyi Liu, Lei Guo, Kate Mays, Margrit Betke, and Derry Tanti Wijaya. 2019. Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Its Application to Analyzing News Framing Trends Surrounding U.S. Gun Violence. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 504–514, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Its Application to Analyzing News Framing Trends Surrounding U.S. Gun Violence (Liu et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1047.pdf
Data
GVFC