S ocio F illmore: A Tool for Discovering Perspectives (2022)

Abstract: SOCIOFILLMORE is a multilingual tool which helps to bring to the fore the focus or the perspective that a text expresses in depicting an event. Our tool, whose rationale we also support through a large collection of human judgements, is theoretically grounded on frame semantics and cognitive linguistics, and implemented using the LOME frame semantic parser. We describe SOCIOFILLMORE’s development and functionalities, show how non-NLP researchers can easily interact with the tool, and present some example case studies which are already incorporated in the system, together with the kind of analysis that can be visualised.

## introduction descriptions of the very same event can vary widely. sometimes completely different versions of a situation can be reported, while other times more subtle differences emerge by the way in which such situations or episodes are depicted by choosing specific natural language expressions. figure 1 illustrates this: in the first sentence the car crash is lexicalized by the noun "collision" leaving the entire dynamic unknown and suggesting that the cyclist may have some responsibility. on the contrary, the second sentence uses the verb "hit" with a subject (the agent) and an object (the patient) making more transparent how the event happened and who is responsible for it. this phenomenon is known as framing or perspsectivization, and can happen in any discourse either in full awareness or, more often, unconsciously @xcite . politics, for instance, is the prime arena where intentional and biased framing takes place @xcite @xcite , but this occurs also in other domains, such as sports. indeed, representation alternatives, namely the different choices that language allows to describe the same event (not only at the lexical but also at the syntactic and pragmatic level), are key to expressing and understanding the ideological power of discourse @xcite . different theoretical frameworks can guide the study of framing and perspectivization in discourse, such as critical discourse analysis (cda) @xcite and frame semantics @xcite . while nlp tools based on some of such frameworks do exist to potentially support large-scale text analysis of perspectivization, and more specifically of fillmore's frame semantics @xcite , they are (i) recent, thus not yet established as analysis tools for specific perspectivization problems outside of the nlp community; (ii) technical, so that their adoption is basically impossible for the nonexperts, who would though benefit from them. on the other hand, cognitive linguists have carried out cognitive linguistic analyses on the discourse regarding social issues and events (e.g. @xcite ), but these analyses usually imply manual scrutiny of data and, accordingly, deal with small datasets. we fill this gap with the development of sociofillmore, a user-friendly multilingual tool based on frame semantics which allows users to conduct large-scale analyses of text by highlighting the perspectivization strategies they adopt. foot_0 ## context & evidence in this section, we highlight the theoretical frameworks that have guided the design of sociofillmore and the empirical evidence we have collected to support its application to written corpora. ## case studies sociofillmore has been applied (so far) to three case studies: italian news reporting on femicides, italian news reporting on migration, and dutch news reporting on traffic crashes. in each of these cases, we target events where there is a potential imbalance of power between the actors involved and the attribution of responsibility for the happening to (at least) one of the participants of the event. this makes the study of the perspectives associated with the reporting of these events very suitable to investigate how responsibility is framed in news reports of such events, and where potential representation biases may emerge. ## conclusions sociofillmore is a multilingual tool that we have developed for studying perspectives in written text, grounded in frame semantics and cognitive linguistics. through an interactive mode, the tool is easily accessible to non-experts, too. we support the rationale for the validity of our tool through a rigorous evaluation of the frame semantic parser at the core of our tool and a collection of human judgement on the connection between frames and perspectivization. the tool is available as a web interface (and as a docker release), it supports multiple languages, and already integrates a few large-scale case studies which can be browsed for research, but also for further understanding of the tool's functionalities.