Clash of the models: Comparing performance of BERT-based variants for generic news frame detection

Framing continues to remain one of the most extensively applied theories in political communication. Developments in computation, particularly with the introduction of transformer architecture and more so with large language models (LLMs), have naturally prompted scholars to explore various novel computational approaches, especially for deductive frame detection, in recent years. While many studies have shown that different transformer models outperform their preceding models that use bag-of-words features, the debate continues to evolve regarding how these models compare with each other on classification tasks. By placing itself at this juncture, this study makes three key contributions: First, it comparatively performs generic news frame detection and compares the performance of five BERT-based variants (BERT, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, DistilBERT and ALBERT) to add to the debate on best practices around employing computational text analysis for political communication studies. Second, it introduces various fine-tuned models capable of robustly performing generic news frame detection. Third, building upon numerous previous studies that work with US-centric data, this study provides the scholarly community with a labelled generic news frames dataset based on the Swiss electoral context that aids in testing the contextual robustness of these computational approaches to framing analysis.

Finding frames with BERT: A transformer-based approach to generic news frame detection

Framing is among the most extensively used concepts in the field of communication science. The availability of digital data offers new possibilities for studying how specific aspects of social reality are made more salient in online communication but also raises challenges related to the scaling of framing analysis and its adoption to new research areas (e.g. studying the impact of artificial intelligence-powered systems on representation of societally relevant issues). To address these challenges, we introduce a transformer-based approach for generic news frame detection in Anglophone online content. While doing so, we discuss the composition of the training and test datasets, the model architecture, and the validation of the approach and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the automated detection of generic news frames.