Mitigating Framing Bias with Polarity Minimization Loss
This addresses framing bias in media reporting for reducing political polarization, but it is incremental as it builds on existing summarization models.
The paper tackled framing bias in political polarization by proposing a polarity minimization loss function, which reduced framing bias substantially compared to a BART-based multi-document summarization model, with effectiveness most pronounced for informational framing bias.
Framing bias plays a significant role in exacerbating political polarization by distorting the perception of actual events. Media outlets with divergent political stances often use polarized language in their reporting of the same event. We propose a new loss function that encourages the model to minimize the polarity difference between the polarized input articles to reduce framing bias. Specifically, our loss is designed to jointly optimize the model to map polarity ends bidirectionally. Our experimental results demonstrate that incorporating the proposed polarity minimization loss leads to a substantial reduction in framing bias when compared to a BART-based multi-document summarization model. Notably, we find that the effectiveness of this approach is most pronounced when the model is trained to minimize the polarity loss associated with informational framing bias (i.e., skewed selection of information to report).