Beneath the tip of the melting iceberg: uncovering deep narrative structures in climate change news
Authors: Yulia Otmakhova, Lea Frermann


Reviewer paper summaries: The paper proposes a new framework for understanding climate change narratives in news media. The authors introduce a three-part structure for analyzing narratives by : Characters: Identifying the key actors (heroes, villains, victims), Action: Determining the central action or attitude toward climate policy expressed in the article, Cultural Story: Mapping the narrative onto broader cultural narratives about climate change, like hierarchical.
The authors apply this framework to analyze 100 news articles and identify 16 distinct climate change narratives. They demonstrate how incorporating this structured approach improves the ability of large language models to automatically identify and classify these narratives.
Summary of strengths: - Paper is well written and descriptive.
- Paper tackles a very important problem and will release an important dataset.
- Well articulated motivation and grounding of narrative finding.
Summary of weaknesses: - My main concern is that as one of the main contributions of the paper is the dataset, the paper does not go in detail about the collection process. How many annotators were used? What was the agreement? Some of the tasks/classes are a bit ambiguous, for a high quality dataset it is important to define some collection metrics.
- Connection with programmatic framing of news articles. Work by Boydstun, Media frames corpus etc led to many works including on climate change news articles. How are narratives found overlap with narratives found in climate change framing studies for example,  ( top results for me https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-17114-7_6 or https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2189&context=jac etc) 
- Authors don’t discuss the why of LLM results. Was the reason for lower accuracy just the number of classes or something else? Is it possible to do more ablation studies with lesser prompts?
Comments, suggestions and typos: -  Finetuning should not be a future work.
- The narratives could greatly inform the climate communication. I would love to see some work on how we can better communicate or reduce confusion on climate change if we use the method at scale.
Overall assessment scores: 3