Media Framing: A typology and Survey of Computational Approaches Across Disciplines (2024)

Abstract: Framing studies how individuals and societies make sense of the world, by communicating or representing complex issues through schema of interpretation. The framing of information in the mass media influences our interpretation of facts and corresponding decisions, so detecting and analysing it is essential to understand biases in the information we consume. Despite that, framing is still mostly examined manually, on a case-by-case basis, while existing large-scale automatic analyses using NLP methods are not mature enough to solve this task. In this survey we show that despite the growing interest to framing in NLP its current approaches do not capture those aspects which allow to frame, rather than simply convey, the message. To this end, we bring together definitions of frames and framing adopted in different disciplines; examine cognitive, linguistic, and communicative aspects a frame contains beyond its topical content. We survey recent work on computational frame detection, and discuss how framing aspects and frame definitions are (or should) be reflected in NLP approaches.

## introduction media framing refers to the packaging of information in a way to evoke a specific association in the reader, often with the aim to alter opinions, attitudes or behavior @xcite . this process involves three aspects: linguistic choice of how to encode the information (semantics); associations evoked in the reader which depend on individuals' existing cognitive schemata, categories or stereotypes (cognition); and the communicative act of (repeated) emphasis of a particular frame, and its effect on the audience (communication) @xcite . computational approaches to frame detection have predominantly compared different contexts in which a given issue is discussed, emphasizing the communicative dimension, which has led to a disproportionate emphasis on asking how a message is conveyed, rather than how it is framed. in reviewing the origins and effects of framing from a variety of perspectives, we highlight a critical gap in current nlp models of framing: for framing to occur there needs to be an underlying ambivalence which gives rise to conflicting cognitive associations that may be evoked @xcite . through framing the communicator can emphasize only the desired associations in the target audience, leading to their perception as more valid, important, morally superior compared to alternatives. here, we lay out the multi-disciplinary origins of framing, and draw connections across disciplines and theories. we present a typology of framing by grounding the most prominent framing types covered in nlp in their cross-disciplinary foundations (figure 1 ). we note that semantic, cognitive and communicative framing have all been addressed in nlp separately, and point to opportunities in combining these research directions for a more integrated and ecologically valid research agenda. we contextualize our discussion in a survey of work on automatic frame prediction. our work relates recent surveys on framing in media studies @xcite , cognitive linguistics @xcite , and social psychology @xcite to nlp. unlike @xcite , who survey nlp methodologies for frame detection, we focus on the conceptualizations adopted @xcite in the field. ## methods we collected literature on computational and quantitative approaches to media framing, following the methods adopted in systematic reviews @xcite , as described in appendix a. the resulting set contains 152 papers, published between 1997 and 2024. 19% of included papers do not mention "frame" or "framing" in their title, while 8% do not have these words in their abstract either. this shows that it is easy to overlook a substantial part of relevant research when relying only on these search keywords, as it was done previously @xcite . the majority of included papers (112) address framing in english, with a small number of studies on german (7), chinese, dutch, italian, persian, russian, spanish (2 each), bulgarian (1), and some multi-lingual approaches (18). ## types of media framing and their coverage in nlp approaches media framing is a complex phenomenon not only because it can be studied from different perspectives, as we discussed in section 3.2, but also because it is realized in text using a variety of dis-course devices of different levels of abstraction. moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no widely adopted typology that explains how different types of framing operate and interact with each other. perhaps, for this reason, researchers commonly lump together frames of different types and granularities in their analyses (see, for example, yu ( 2022 here, we propose a typology of the most common high-level types of framing in nlp, grounded in the three levels of framing we discussed in section 3.1. then, in section 4.2 we drill into their subtypes and discuss how well they are detected and analysed using automatic methods. ## discussion and future directions to conclude, we highlight two overarching issues which we believe currently block the maturing of the field. first, the landscape is still fractured and disconnected: only a few studies examine the interaction between types of framing (section 4.2), connect their experiments with a broader context such as political and psychological studies of frame building and framing effects, or explore (or at least integrate) underlying features of semantic and cognitive framing, as well as the existing resources that could support that such as framenet or narrative schema (chambers and jurafsky, 2010) (section 3.3). thus, we still fail to incorporate theoretical frameworks, related linguistics and nlp resources. the bigger issue, however, is that most current research seems to be oblivious of what a "frame" is exactly, despite almost universally quoting definitions of framing in their work. we hope that our paper will improve this issue. much has been said (above and in previous works such as @xcite ) about the problems with treating frames as general or specific topics, but what actually turns a topic-only message into a framed one? framing is often linked to the presence of sentiment, moral evaluation, or specific devices such as rhetorical structures or metaphors. these are, however, only a part of it, and do not help to differentiate a frame from, say, an emotionally charged stance. following scheufele and scheufele (2010), we showed that what makes a media frame is its ambivalence, i.e. the presence of alternative cognitive frames that can be activated in someone else's mind regarding the same issue or event. consider the following example: luis garavito ruthlessly killed over 190 people. most current approaches would predict a frame: the sentence contains a clear indication of villain and victim (narrative framing), a power-agency verb "kill" (connotation framing), which also appears in the moral foundations dictionary @xcite so the sentence can be classified as "harm" generic frame, and negative sentiment ("ruthlessly"). the sentence, however, states a historical fact with our emotional interpretation of it. garavito is a convicted serial killer, so we do not frame him as a villain: he is a villain, and his name itself brings up the "killer" association. now, consider another example: donald trump unnecessarily killed thousands of people because of his covid-19 policies. this sentence also presents all the features we listed above, and it is a frame. the difference is that the entity "trump" does not have the "killer" meaning in its cognitive frame: we add it temporarily, inheriting it from the "kill" cognitive frame, and we do it by choosing from a constellation of other possible cognitive frames (scheufele and scheufele, 2010). this "constellation" is created because of ambivalence of responsibility: nothing in the "trump" frame marks him as responsible for the deaths, and we might as well frame him as "hero" or "victim". in garavito's case (as well as in more metaphorical sentences such as "hurricane maria killed over 3000 people") our common sense prohibits it, so framing is impossible. as the example shows, this requirement for ambiguity of interpretation applies not only to emphasis framing but to all types (except for equivalency framing, which already encodes ambivalence, as the presence of a "gain" cognitive frame presupposes the existence of a "loss" one, as we explain above in section 4.1). thus, we believe that it would be difficult to differentiate frames from topics, stances, and arguments and thus do meaningful framing analysis unless we integrate the detection of such ambivalence into our methods. again, this can be done only if we employ semantic and cognitive framing resources and connect different layers of framing: for instance, in the example above we would need a way to detect that the verb "kill" activates the cognitive frame of "villain", and check if the cognitive frame of "trump" contains that meaning already. despite progress in both understanding of and computational approaches to framing since the early days when topic models dominated framing research, many conceptual and methodolog-ical challenges remain in unifying entman (1993)'s "fractured paradigm". we hope the current work helps to establish solid theoretical and typology foundations for framing research and shines some light on its current gaps and future opportunities. ## limitations the paper retrieval, inclusion and exclusion, as well as annotation were performed by a single reviewer (the first author of the paper), which means that despite our best efforts to ensure thorough coverage of the published papers as explained in appendix a, some of the related works could have been undiscovered. moreover, human errors were possible when assigning papers to categories or referring to them in the survey. however, we strove to avoid such errors by collecting studies from multiple sources and annotating the paper categories twice. thus, despite the fact that minor inconsistencies or omissions might remain, we believe that this 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