Issue Framing in Online Discussion Fora

Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019, pages 1401–1407 Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2 - June 7, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 1401 Issue Framing in Online Discussion Fora Mareike Hartmann1 Tallulah Jansen2 Isabelle Augenstein1 Anders Søgaard1 1Dep. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark {hartmann,augenstein,soegaard}@di.ku.dk 2Inst. of Cognitive Science, Osnabr¨uck University, Germany taljansen@uni-osnabrueck.de Abstract In online discussion fora, speakers often make arguments for or against something, say birth control, by highlighting certain aspects of the topic. In social science, this is referred to as issue framing. In this paper, we introduce a new issue frame annotated corpus of online discussions. We explore to what extent mod- els trained to detect issue frames in newswire and social media can be transferred to the do- main of discussion fora, using a combination of multi-task and adversarial training, assum- ing only unlabeled training data in the target domain. 1 Introduction The framing of an issue refers to a choice of per- spective, often motivated by an attempt to influ- ence its perception and interpretation (Entman, 1993; Chong and Druckman, 2007). The way is- sues are framed can change the evolution of pol- icy as well as public opinion (Dardis et al., 2008; Iyengar, 1991). As an illustration, contrast the statement Illegal workers depress wages with This country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers. The first statement puts fo- cus on the economic consequences of immigra- tion, whereas the second one evokes a morality frame by pointing out the inhumane conditions under which immigrants may have to work. Be- ing exposed to primarily one of those perspectives might affect the publics attitude towards immigra- tion. Computational methods for frame classifica- tion have previously been studied in news articles (Card et al., 2015) and social media posts (John- son et al., 2017). In this work, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, based on a subset of the 15 generic frames in the Policy Frames Codebook by Boydstun et al. (2014). We focus on frame clas- sification in online discussion fora, which have be- Platform: Online discussions Economic Frame, Topic: Same sex marriage But as we have seen, supporting same-sex marriage saves money. Legality Frame, Topic: Same sex marriage So you admit that it is a right and it is being denied? Platform: News articles Economic Frame, Topic: Immigration Study Finds That Immigrants Are Central to Long Island Economy Legality Frame, Topic: Same sex marriage Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court granted same-sex couples the right to marry. Platform: Twitter Legality Frame, Topic: Same sex marriage Congress must fight to ensure LGBT people have the full protection of the law everywhere in America. #EqualityAct Table 1: Example instances from the datasets de- scribed in §2 and 3. come crucial platforms for public dialogue on so- cial and political issues. Table 1 shows example annotations, compared to previous annotations for news articles and social media. Dialogue data is substantially different from news articles and so- cial media, and we therefore explore ways to trans- fer information from these …

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