Doctor Who? Framing Through Names and Titles in German

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4924–4932 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4924 Doctor Who? Framing Through Names and Titles in German Esther van den Berg∗‡, Katharina Korfhage†, Josef Ruppenhofer∗‡, Michael Wiegand∗ and Katja Markert∗† ∗Leibniz ScienceCampus, Heidelberg/Mannheim, Germany †Institute of Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Germany ‡Institute for German Language, Mannheim, Germany {vdberg|korfhage|markert}@cl.uni-heidelberg.de {ruppenhofer|wiegand}@ids-mannheim.de Abstract Entity framing is the selection of aspects of an entity to promote a particular viewpoint towards that entity. We investigate entity framing of political figures through the use of names and titles in German online discourse, enhancing current research in entity framing through titling and naming that concentrates on English only. We collect tweets that mention prominent German politicians and annotate them for stance. We find that the formality of naming in these tweets correlates positively with their stance. This confirms sociolinguistic observations that naming and titling can have a status-indicating function and suggests that this function is dominant in German tweets mentioning political figures. We also find that this status-indicating function is much weaker in tweets from users that are politically left-leaning than in tweets by right-leaning users. This is in line with observations from moral psychology that left-leaning and right-leaning users assign different importance to maintaining social hierarchies. Keywords: framing, naming, Twitter, German, stance, sentiment, social media 1. Introduction To frame a topic is to “to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communication text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem defi- nition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treat- ment recommendation” towards that topic (Entman, 1993, p. 52). For example, a text may discuss the topic of im- migration primarily in an economic frame that focuses on the need for workers, or in a cultural frame that focuses on issues of diversity and integration. Most work on framing in computational linguistics has focused on the framing of issues and events, rather than entities (Card et al., 2015; Fulgoni et al., 2016; Field et al., 2018). In previous work (van den Berg et al., 2019), we introduced entity framing as the presentation of an entity that (inten- tionally or not) promotes a particular viewpoint towards that entity. Our goal is to understand how bias and stance are expressed in computer-mediated discourse about politi- cal topics, in light of rising concern that discussions about politics on social media are less civil and objective than dis- cussions on traditional platforms (Persily, 2017; Ott, 2017; Dang-Xuan et al., 2013). One area in which entities can be framed more or less posi- tively is in the use of names and titles. Sociolinguists iden- tify two main functions of naming: the indication of the sta- tus of the target, and the indication of solidarity with the tar- get (Brown and Ford, 1961; Allerton, 1996; Dickey, 1997). We found that the formality of naming forms correlates pos- itively with stance in English tweets mentioning …

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