Abstract:Understanding how news narratives frame entities is crucial for studying media's impact on societal perceptions of events. In this paper, we evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in classifying framing roles. Through systematic experimentation, we assess the effects of input context, prompting strategies, and task decomposition. Our findings show that a hierarchical approach of first identifying broad roles and then fine-grained roles, outperforms single-step classification. We also demonstrate that optimal input contexts and prompts vary across task levels, highlighting the need for subtask-specific strategies. We achieve a Main Role Accuracy of 89.4% and an Exact Match Ratio of 34.5%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings emphasize the importance of tailored prompt design and input context optimization for improving LLM performance in entity framing.
Abstract:This paper introduces UnSeenTimeQA, a novel time-sensitive question-answering (TSQA) benchmark that diverges from traditional TSQA benchmarks by avoiding factual and web-searchable queries. We present a series of time-sensitive event scenarios decoupled from real-world factual information. It requires large language models (LLMs) to engage in genuine temporal reasoning, disassociating from the knowledge acquired during the pre-training phase. Our evaluation of six open-source LLMs (ranging from 2B to 70B in size) and three closed-source LLMs reveal that the questions from the UnSeenTimeQA present substantial challenges. This indicates the models' difficulties in handling complex temporal reasoning scenarios. Additionally, we present several analyses shedding light on the models' performance in answering time-sensitive questions.