Margrit Betke


2022

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Prediction of People’s Emotional Response towards Multi-modal News
Ge Gao | Sejin Paik | Carley Reardon | Yanling Zhao | Lei Guo | Prakash Ishwar | Margrit Betke | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We aim to develop methods for understanding how multimedia news exposure can affect people’s emotional responses, and we especially focus on news content related to gun violence, a very important yet polarizing issue in the U.S. We created the dataset NEmo+ by significantly extending the U.S. gun violence news-to-emotions dataset, BU-NEmo, from 320 to 1,297 news headline and lead image pairings and collecting 38,910 annotations in a large crowdsourcing experiment. In curating the NEmo+ dataset, we developed methods to identify news items that will trigger similar versus divergent emotional responses. For news items that trigger similar emotional responses, we compiled them into the NEmo+-Consensus dataset. We benchmark models on this dataset that predict a person’s dominant emotional response toward the target news item (single-label prediction). On the full NEmo+ dataset, containing news items that would lead to both differing and similar emotional responses, we also benchmark models for the novel task of predicting the distribution of evoked emotional responses in humans when presented with multi-modal news content. Our single-label and multi-label prediction models outperform baselines by large margins across several metrics.

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BU-NEmo: an Affective Dataset of Gun Violence News
Carley Reardon | Sejin Paik | Ge Gao | Meet Parekh | Yanling Zhao | Lei Guo | Margrit Betke | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Given our society’s increased exposure to multimedia formats on social media platforms, efforts to understand how digital content impacts people’s emotions are burgeoning. As such, we introduce a U.S. gun violence news dataset that contains news headline and image pairings from 840 news articles with 15K high-quality, crowdsourced annotations on emotional responses to the news pairings. We created three experimental conditions for the annotation process: two with a single modality (headline or image only), and one multimodal (headline and image together). In contrast to prior works on affectively-annotated data, our dataset includes annotations on the dominant emotion experienced with the content, the intensity of the selected emotion and an open-ended, written component. By collecting annotations on different modalities of the same news content pairings, we explore the relationship between image and text influence on human emotional response. We offer initial analysis on our dataset, showing the nuanced affective differences that appear due to modality and individual factors such as political leaning and media consumption habits. Our dataset is made publicly available to facilitate future research in affective computing.

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An Unsupervised Approach to Discover Media Frames
Sha Lai | Yanru Jiang | Lei Guo | Margrit Betke | Prakash Ishwar | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Proceedings of the LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences

Media framing refers to highlighting certain aspect of an issue in the news to promote a particular interpretation to the audience. Supervised learning has often been used to recognize frames in news articles, requiring a known pool of frames for a particular issue, which must be identified by communication researchers through thorough manual content analysis. In this work, we devise an unsupervised learning approach to discover the frames in news articles automatically. Given a set of news articles for a given issue, e.g., gun violence, our method first extracts frame elements from these articles using related Wikipedia articles and the Wikipedia category system. It then uses a community detection approach to identify frames from these frame elements. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the frames it generates in an unsupervised manner to the domain-expert-derived frames for the issue of gun violence, for which a supervised learning model for frame recognition exists.

2021

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Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage
Isidora Tourni | Lei Guo | Taufiq Husada Daryanto | Fabian Zhafransyah | Edward Edberg Halim | Mona Jalal | Boqi Chen | Sha Lai | Hengchang Hu | Margrit Betke | Prakash Ishwar | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

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.

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OpenFraming: Open-sourced Tool for Computational Framing Analysis of Multilingual Data
Vibhu Bhatia | Vidya Prasad Akavoor | Sejin Paik | Lei Guo | Mona Jalal | Alyssa Smith | David Assefa Tofu | Edward Edberg Halim | Yimeng Sun | Margrit Betke | Prakash Ishwar | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

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.

2020

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Multi-Label and Multilingual News Framing Analysis
Afra Feyza Akyürek | Lei Guo | Randa Elanwar | Prakash Ishwar | Margrit Betke | Derry Tanti Wijaya
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

News framing refers to the practice in which aspects of specific issues are highlighted in the news to promote a particular interpretation. In NLP, although recent works have studied framing in English news, few have studied how the analysis can be extended to other languages and in a multi-label setting. In this work, we explore multilingual transfer learning to detect multiple frames from just the news headline in a genuinely low-resource context where there are few/no frame annotations in the target language. We propose a novel method that can leverage elementary resources consisting of a dictionary and few annotations to detect frames in the target language. Our method performs comparably or better than translating the entire target language headline to the source language for which we have annotated data. This work opens up an exciting new capability of scaling up frame analysis to many languages, even those without existing translation technologies. Lastly, we apply our method to detect frames on the issue of U.S. gun violence in multiple languages and obtain exciting insights on the relationship between different frames of the same problem across different countries with different languages.

2019

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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
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

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.