Beyond the Battlefield: Framing Analysis of Media Coverage in Conflict Reporting

Framing used by news media, especially in times of conflict, can have substantial impact on readers' opinion, potentially aggravating the conflict itself. Current studies on the topic of conflict framing have limited insights due to their qualitative nature or only look at surface level generic frames without going deeper. In this work, we identify indicators of war and peace journalism, as outlined by prior work in conflict studies, in a corpus of news articles reporting on the Israel-Palestine war. For our analysis, we use computational approaches, using a combination of frame semantics and large language models to identify both communicative framing and its connection to linguistic framing. Our analysis reveals a higher focus on war based reporting rather than peace based. We also show substantial differences in reporting across the US, UK, and Middle Eastern news outlets in framing who the assailant and victims of the conflict are, surfacing biases within the media.

Tell Me Why Is It So? Explaining Knowledge Graph Relationships by Finding Descriptive Support Passages

We address the problem of finding descriptive explanations of facts stored in a knowledge graph. This is important in high-risk domains such as healthcare, intelligence, etc. where users need additional information for decision making and is especially crucial for applications that rely on automatically constructed knowledge bases where machine learned systems extract facts from an input corpus and working of the extractors is opaque to the end-user. We follow an approach inspired from information retrieval and propose a simple and efficient, yet effective solution that takes into account passage level as well as document level properties to produce a ranked list of passages describing a given input relation. We test our approach using Wikidata as the knowledge base and Wikipedia as the source corpus and report results of user studies conducted to study the effectiveness of our proposed model.