In this paper we suggest a minimally-supervised approach for identifying nuanced frames in news article coverage of politically divisive topics. We suggest to break the broad policy frames suggested by Boydstun et al., 2014 into fine-grained subframes which can capture differences in political ideology in a better way. We evaluate the suggested subframes and their embedding, learned using minimal supervision, over three topics, namely, immigration, gun-control and abortion. We demonstrate the ability of the subframes to capture ideological differences and analyze political discourse in news media.
Sofia University（索非亚大学）；TIET；QCRI, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We study the problem of profiling news media on the Web with respect to their factuality of reporting and bias. This is an important but under-studied problem related to disinformation and "fake news" detection, but it addresses the issue at a coarser granularity compared to looking at an individual article or an individual claim. This is useful as it allows to profile entire media outlets in advance. Unlike previous work, which has focused primarily on text (e.g.,~on the text of the articles published by the target website, or on the textual description in their social media profiles or in Wi…
We present an automated method for measuring media bias. Inferring which newspaper published a given article, based only on the frequencies with which it uses different phrases, leads to a conditional probability distribution whose analysis lets us automatically map newspapers and phrases into a bias space. By analyzing roughly a million articles from roughly a hundred newspapers for bias in dozens of news topics, our method maps newspapers into a two-dimensional bias landscape that agrees well with previous bias classifications based on human judgement. One dimension can be interpreted as tra…
PathCheck Foundation（PathCheck基金会）；Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City（印度信息技术学院斯里城分校）
Withtheadventofsocialmedia,therehasbeenanextremely rapid increase in the content shared online. Consequently, the propagation of fake news and hostile messages on social media platforms has also skyrocketed. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting hostile and fake content in the Devanagari (Hindi) script as a multi-class, multi-label problem. Using NLP techniques, we build a model that makes use of an abusive language detector coupled with features extracted via Hindi BERT and Hindi FastText models and metadata. Our model achieves a 0.97 F1 score on coarse grain evaluation on Hostil…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Identifying political perspectives in news media has become an important task due to the rapid growth of political commentary and the increasingly polarized political ideologies. Previous approaches focus on textual content and leave out the rich social and political context that is essential in the perspective detection process. To address this limitation, we propose KGAP, a political perspective detection method that incorporates external domain knowledge. Specifically, we construct a political knowledge graph to serve as domain-specific external knowledge. We then construct heterogeneous in…
In recent years, with the expansion of the Internet and attractive social media infrastructures, people prefer to follow the news through these media. Despite the many advantages of these media in the news field, the lack of any control and verification mechanism has led to the spread of fake news, as one of the most important threats to democracy, economy, journalism and freedom of expression. Designing and using automatic methods to detect fake news on social media has become a significant challenge. In this paper, we examine the publishers' role in detecting fake news on social media. We al…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
The evolution of social media platforms have empowered everyone to access information easily. Social media users can easily share information with the rest of the world. This may sometimes encourage spread of fake news, which can result in undesirable consequences. In this work, we train models which can identify health news related to COVID-19 pandemic as real or fake. Our models achieve a high F1-score of 98.64%. Our models achieve second place on the leaderboard, tailing the first position with a very narrow margin 0.05% points.
Social media is becoming an increasingly important data source for learning about breaking news and for following the latest developments of ongoing news. This is in part possible thanks to the existence of mobile devices, which allows anyone with access to the Internet to post updates from anywhere, leading in turn to a growing presence of citizen journalism. Consequently, social media has become a go-to resource for journalists during the process of newsgathering. Use of social media for newsgathering is however challenging, and suitable tools are needed in order to facilitate access to usef…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology（毛拉纳·阿布·卡拉姆·阿扎德理工大学）
The growing political polarization of the American electorate over the last several decades has been widely studied and documented. During the administration of President Donald Trump, charges of "fake news" made social and news media not only the means but, to an unprecedented extent, the topic of political communication. Using data from before the November 3rd, 2020 US Presidential election, recent work has demonstrated the viability of using YouTube's social media ecosystem to obtain insights into the extent of US political polarization as well as the relationship between this polarization …
Online news media sometimes use misleading headlines to lure users to open the news article. These catchy headlines that attract users but disappointed them at the end, are called Clickbaits. Because of the importance of automatic clickbait detection in online medias, lots of machine learning methods were proposed and employed to find the clickbait headlines. In this research, a model using deep learning methods is proposed to find the clickbaits in Clickbait Challenge 2017's dataset. The proposed model gained the first rank in the Clickbait Challenge 2017 in terms of Mean Squared Error. Also,…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
A corpus of Hindi news headlines shared on Twitter was created by collecting tweets of 5 mainstream Hindi news sources for a period of 4 months. 7 independent annotators were recruited to mark the 20 most retweeted news posts by each of the 5 news sources on its clickbait nature. The clickbait score hence generated was assessed for its correlation with interactions on the platform (retweets, favorites, reader replies), tweet word count, and normalized POS (part-of-speech) tag counts in tweets. A positive correlation was observed between readers' interactions with tweets and tweets' clickbait s…
Soongsil University（崇实大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）
To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing articles, the research community does not own a sufficient understanding of what kinds of editing strategies effectively promote audience engagement. In this study, we aim to fill the gap by analyzing media outlets' current practices using a data-driven approach. We first build a parallel corpus of original news articles and their corresponding tweets that eigh…
Unraveling Media Perspectives: A Comprehensive Methodology Combining Large Language Models, Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Ontology Learning to Analyse Media Bias
Institute of IT Management and Digitization Research (IFID)（信息管理与数字化研究学院）
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Autoritas Consulting（奥里塔斯咨询公司）
Fake news is risky since it has been created to manipulate the readers' opinions and beliefs. In this work, we compared the language of false news to the real one of real news from an emotional perspective, considering a set of false information types (propaganda, hoax, clickbait, and satire) from social media and online news articles sources. Our experiments showed that false information has different emotional patterns in each of its types, and emotions play a key role in deceiving the reader. Based on that, we proposed a LSTM neural network model that is emotionally-infused to detect false …
We release our COVID-19 news dataset, containing more than 10,000 links to news articles related to the Coronavirus pandemic published in the Swiss media since early January 2020. This collection can prove beneficial in mining and analysis of the reaction of the Swiss media and the COVID-19 pandemic and extracting insightful information for further research. We hope this dataset helps researchers and the public deliver results that will help analyse the pandemic and potentially lead to a better understanding of the events.
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
In this article, we quantitatively analyze how the term "fake news" is being shaped in news media in recent years. We study the perception and the conceptualization of this term in the traditional media using eight years of data collected from news outlets based in 20 countries. Our results not only corroborate previous indications of a high increase in the usage of the expression "fake news", but also show contextual changes around this expression after the United States presidential election of 2016. Among other results, we found changes in the related vocabulary, in the mentioned entities, …
Universidad de Valladolid（巴利亚多利德大学）；Complejo Asistencial de Soria（索里亚综合医疗中心）；Hospital General Universitario de Ciudad Real（雷阿尔城大学综合医院）；Sermes CRO
While it remains a taboo topic, gender-based violence (GBV) undermines the health, dignity, security and autonomy of its victims. Many factors have been studied to generate or maintain this kind of violence, however, the influence of the media is still uncertain. Here, we use Machine Learning tools to extrapolate the effect of the news in GBV. By feeding neural networks with news, the topic information associated with each article can be recovered. Our findings show a relationship between GBV news and public awareness, the effect of mediatic GBV cases, and the intrinsic thematic relationship o…
Media Bias Matters: Understanding the Impact of Politically Biased News on Vaccine Attitudes in Social Media
School of Computing and AI, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago（芝加哥伊利诺伊大学计算机科学系）；ByteDance Research（字节跳动研究院）
Universiti Brunei Darussalam（文莱达鲁萨兰大学）；IIIT Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Media news are making a large part of public opinion and, therefore, must not be fake. News on web sites, blogs, and social media must be analyzed before being published. In this paper, we present linguistic characteristics of media news items to differentiate between fake news and real news using machine learning algorithms. Neural fake news generation, headlines created by machines, semantic incongruities in text and image captions generated by machine are other types of fake news problems. These problems use neural networks which mainly control distributional features rather than evidence. …
pressrelations GmbH（pressrelations有限公司）；Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf（海因里希·海涅杜塞尔多夫大学）
In this work, we present the results of a systematic study to investigate the (commercial) benefits of automatic text summarization systems in a real world scenario. More specifically, we define a use case in the context of media monitoring and media response analysis and claim that even using a simple query-based extractive approach can dramatically save the processing time of the employees without significantly reducing the quality of their work.
Predicting Sentence-Level Factuality of News and Bias of Media Outlets
Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学数学与计算机科学研究所）；Computer Science Department, Federal University of Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学计算机科学系）；Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学可信互联网与社区中心）
Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立理工学院）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
We propose a novel framework for predicting the factuality of reporting of news media outlets by studying the user attention cycles in their YouTube channels. In particular, we design a rich set of features derived from the temporal evolution of the number of views, likes, dislikes, and comments for a video, which we then aggregate to the channel level. We develop and release a dataset for the task, containing observations of user attention on YouTube channels for 489 news media. Our experiments demonstrate both complementarity and sizable improvements over state-of-the-art textual representat…
Evolving to the Future: Unseen Event Adaptive Fake News Detection on Social Media
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Media seems to have become more partisan, often providing a biased coverage of news catering to the interest of specific groups. It is therefore essential to identify credible information content that provides an objective narrative of an event. News communities such as digg, reddit, or newstrust offer recommendations, reviews, quality ratings, and further insights on journalistic works. However, there is a complex interaction between different factors in such online communities: fairness and style of reporting, language clarity and objectivity, topical perspectives (like political viewpoint),…
University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
News media websites are important online resources that have drawn great attention of text mining researchers. The main aim of this study is to propose a framework for ranking online news websites from different viewpoints. The ranking of news websites is useful information, which can benefit many news-related tasks such as news retrieval and news recommendation. In the proposed framework, the ranking of news websites is obtained by calculating three measures introduced in the paper and based on user-generated content. Each proposed measure is concerned with the performance of news websites fr…
Bangla AI: A Framework for Machine Translation Utilizing Large Language Models for Ethnic Media
College of Media & Communication, Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学媒体与传播学院）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学数学与统计学院）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Sofia University（索非亚大学）
Predicting the political bias and the factuality of reporting of entire news outlets are critical elements of media profiling, which is an understudied but an increasingly important research direction. The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online, has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim, either manually or automatically. Alternatively, we can profile entire news outlets and look for those that are likely to publish fake or biased content. This approach makes it possible to detect likely "fake news" the moment they are publishe…
Institute for Data Science（数据科学研究所）；Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）
Many computational social science projects examine online discourse surrounding a specific trending topic. These works often involve the acquisition of large-scale corpora relevant to the event in question to analyze aspects of the response to the event. Keyword searches present a precision-recall trade-off and crowd-sourced annotations, while effective, are costly. This work aims to enable automatic and accurate ad-hoc retrieval of comments discussing a trending topic from a large corpus, using only a handful of seed news articles.
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is challenging, primarily due to the lack of gold-standard data sets and high context dependencies. In this research project, I aim to devise data sets and methods to identify media bias. To achieve this, I plan to research methods using natural language processing and deep learning while employing models and using analysis concepts from psychology and linguisti…
Fake news detection has become a research area that goes way beyond a purely academic interest as it has direct implications on our society as a whole. Recent advances have primarily focused on textbased approaches. However, it has become clear that to be effective one needs to incorporate additional, contextual information such as spreading behaviour of news articles and user interaction patterns on social media. We propose to construct heterogeneous social context graphs around news articles and reformulate the problem as a graph classification task. Exploring the incorporation of different …
This paper solves the fake news detection problem under a more realistic scenario on social media. Given the source short-text tweet and the corresponding sequence of retweet users without text comments, we aim at predicting whether the source tweet is fake or not, and generating explanation by highlighting the evidences on suspicious retweeters and the words they concern. We develop a novel neural network-based model, Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks (GCAN), to achieve the goal. Extensive experiments conducted on real tweet datasets exhibit that GCAN can significantly outperform state-of-the…
How Loud Rumbles Hit Newsstands: A Data Analysis of Coverage and Spatial Bias in German News about Landslides Around the World
LeipzigLab – Climate Discourse（莱比锡实验室——气候话语）；Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research（亥姆霍兹环境研究中心）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Vrije Universiteit Brussel（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；imec（比利时微电子研究中心）；CRRC Zhuzhou Institute Co., Ltd.（中车株洲所研究院有限公司）
Rumours have existed for a long time and have been known for serious consequences. The rapid growth of social media platforms has multiplied the negative impact of rumours; it thus becomes important to early detect them. Many methods have been introduced to detect rumours using the content or the social context of news. However, most existing methods ignore or do not explore effectively the propagation pattern of news in social media, including the sequence of interactions of social media users with news across time. In this work, we propose a novel method for rumour detection based on deep le…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔 computing 研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim or article, either manually or automatically. Thus, many researchers are shifting their attention to higher granularity, aiming to profile entire news outlets, which makes it possible to detect likely "fake news" the moment it is published, by simply checking the reliability of its source. Source factuality is also an important element of systems for automatic fact-checking and "fake news" detection, as they need to assess the reliability of t…
University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；University of Passau（帕绍大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia（塞尔维亚人工智能研发研究院）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）；NII Tokyo（东京国立信息学研究所）
Media has a substantial impact on the public perception of events. A one-sided or polarizing perspective on any topic is usually described as media bias. One of the ways how bias in news articles can be introduced is by altering word choice. Biased word choices are not always obvious, nor do they exhibit high context-dependency. Hence, detecting bias is often difficult. We propose a Transformer-based deep learning architecture trained via Multi-Task Learning using six bias-related data sets to tackle the media bias detection problem. Our best-performing implementation achieves a macro $F_{1}$ …
