News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called “frames” in communication research. We study, for the first time, the value of combining lead images and their contextual information with text to identify the frame of a given news article. We observe that using multiple modes of information(article- and image-derived features) improves prediction of news frames over any single mode of information when the images are relevant to the frames of the headlines. We also observe that frame image relevance is related to the ease of conveying frames via images, which we call frame concreteness. Additionally, we release the first multimodal news framing dataset related to gun violence in the U.S., curated and annotated by communication researchers. The dataset will allow researchers to further examine the use of multiple information modalities for studying media framing.

When journalists cover a news story, they can cover the story from multiple angles or perspectives. These perspectives are called “frames,” and usage of one frame or another may influence public perception and opinion of the issue at hand. We develop a web-based system for analyzing frames in multilingual text documents. We propose and guide users through a five-step end-to-end computational framing analysis framework grounded in media framing theory in communication research. Users can use the framework to analyze multilingual text data, starting from the exploration of frames in user’s corpora and through review of previous framing literature (step 1-3) to frame classification (step 4) and prediction (step 5). The framework combines unsupervised and supervised machine learning and leverages a state-of-the-art (SoTA) multilingual language model, which can significantly enhance frame prediction performance while requiring a considerably small sample of manual annotations. Through the interactive website, anyone can perform the proposed computational framing analysis, making advanced computational analysis available to researchers without a programming background and bridging the digital divide within the communication research discipline in particular and the academic community in general. The system is available online at http://www.openframing.org, via an API http://www.openframing.org:5000/docs/, or through our GitHub page https://github.com/vibss2397/openFraming.