Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing
This work addresses the need for more nuanced, document-level models of narrative framing in media analysis, which is important for researchers and practitioners in NLP and communication sciences, though it is incremental in integrating existing conceptualizations with new annotation and prediction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of simplifying media frame detection in NLP as single-label classification by proposing a model that captures document-level narrative elements like conflict, resolution, and entity roles (heroes, victims, villains), based on communication science concepts. It presents an annotated dataset of English news articles, explores multi-label prediction methods including a novel retrieval-based approach, and includes a case study on climate change framing across political spectrums.
Despite increasing interest in the automatic detection of media frames in NLP, the problem is typically simplified as single-label classification and adopts a topic-like view on frames, evading modelling the broader document-level narrative. In this work, we revisit a widely used conceptualization of framing from the communication sciences which explicitly captures elements of narratives, including conflict and its resolution, and integrate it with the narrative framing of key entities in the story as heroes, victims or villains. We adapt an effective annotation paradigm that breaks a complex annotation task into a series of simpler binary questions, and present an annotated data set of English news articles, and a case study on the framing of climate change in articles from news outlets across the political spectrum. Finally, we explore automatic multi-label prediction of our frames with supervised and semi-supervised approaches, and present a novel retrieval-based method which is both effective and transparent in its predictions. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities and challenges for future work on document-level models of narrative framing.