A Study on Scaling Up Multilingual News Framing Analysis

Media framing is the study of strategically selecting and presenting specific aspects of political issues to shape public opinion. Despite its relevance to almost all societies around the world, research has been limited due to the lack of available datasets and other resources. This study explores the possibility of dataset creation through crowdsourcing, utilizing non-expert annotators to develop training corpora. We first extend framing analysis beyond English news to a multilingual context (12 typologically diverse languages) through automatic translation. We also present a novel benchmark in Bengali and Portuguese on the immigration and same-sex marriage domains. Additionally, we show that a system trained on our crowd-sourced dataset, combined with other existing ones, leads to a 5.32 percentage point increase from the baseline, showing that crowdsourcing is a viable option. Last, we study the performance of large language models (LLMs) for this task, finding that task-specific fine-tuning is a better approach than employing bigger non-specialized models.

A Survey on the Use of AI and ML for Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have made a paradigm shift in health care which, eventually can be used for decision support and forecasting by exploring the medical data. Recent studies showed that AI and ML can be used to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the objective of this review study is to summarize the recent AI and ML based studies that have focused to fight against COVID-19 pandemic. From an initial set of 634 articles, a total of 35 articles were finally selected through an extensive inclusion-exclusion process. In our review, we have explored the objectives/aims of the existing studies (i.e., the role of AI/ML in fighting COVID-19 pandemic); context of the study (i.e., study focused to a specific country-context or with a global perspective); type and volume of dataset; methodology, algorithms or techniques adopted in the prediction or diagnosis processes; and mapping the algorithms/techniques with the data type highlighting their prediction/classification accuracy. We particularly focused on the uses of AI/ML in analyzing the pandemic data in order to depict the most recent progress of AI for fighting against COVID-19 and pointed out the potential scope of further research.