Econometrics Seminar - Lea Frerman (University of Melbourne)

Title:  Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing.

Abstract: Stories have existed as long as human societies, and are fundamental to communication, culture, and cognition. This talk looks at the interaction of narratives and media framing, i.e., the deliberate presentation of information to elicit a desired response or shift in the reader’s attitude. While rich theories of media framing have emerged from the political and communication sciences in decades of active research, the more recent NLP approaches to automatic frame prediction tend to oversimplify the issue. In particular, I will argue that approaches focus on overly localized lexical signals, make unwarranted independence assumptions, and ignore the broader, narrative context of news articles. I will present two recent projects as a step towards a computational framework of narrative framing by incorporating narrative themes and roles of involved actors to embed framing into a broader narrative context. Quantitative evaluation and case studies on media framing of immigration and global warming show a benefit of the more nuanced emerging frames.