Award Abstract # 2127747
Collaborative Research: III: Small: Entity- and Event-driven Media Bias Detection

NSF Org: IIS
Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
Recipient: REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Initial Amendment Date: August 26, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: March 7, 2022
Award Number: 2127747
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Sylvia Spengler
sspengle@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7347
IIS
 Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: October 1, 2021
End Date: September 30, 2025 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $261,065.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $269,065.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $261,065.00
FY 2022 = $8,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Lu Wang (Principal Investigator)
    wangluxy@umich.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
1109 GEDDES AVE STE 3300
ANN ARBOR
MI  US  48109-1015
(734)763-6438
Sponsor Congressional District: 06
Primary Place of Performance: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
2260 Hayward
Ann Arbor
MI  US  48109-2121
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
06
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): GNJ7BBP73WE9
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Info Integration & Informatics
Primary Program Source: 01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7364, 7923, 9251
Program Element Code(s): 736400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Democracy is shaped by public opinion, and public opinion in turn is significantly influenced by the news that is read, watched, and listened to. It is thus essential for an informed public to understand how the news they consume is being selected, packaged, and presented. This project aims to build computational systems to detect and quantify how media ideology affects the creation and presentation of news at the level of articles and their constituent events. This project will promote the transparency of news production and enhance public awareness of media decisions. The developed tools can effectively and efficiently support the measurement of media ideology at organization- and article-levels, which facilitates research in broad areas, including political science, social science, and communications. The proposed research will involve graduate and undergraduate students from a diverse array of backgrounds, especially underrepresented groups. The developed datasets and methods will form the basis of modules in newly developed courses. The knowledge produced in the project will be distributed to the public via demos, published blogs, talks at podcasts, and guest essays to newspapers.


This project will examine how media bias can result from the packaging of news via the selection and organization of contents presented in news articles, and develop entity- and event-driven computational models for detecting ideological content selection and predicting article-level ideology. Three main research tasks will be explored. First, discourse-aware event categorization models will be developed to distinguish descriptions of main events from other context-informing events and indirectly-related events. Second, an entity- and event-driven contextual representation learning framework will be built to detect media bias by capturing relations between entities and events. Third, adversarial learning will be investigated to predict the political ideology of a news article with a fine-grained score by disentangling media-specific languages from ideological content.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Liu, Y. and Zhang X. and Wegsman D. and Beauchamp N. and Wang, L. "POLITICS: Pretraining with Same-story Article Comparison for Ideology Prediction and Stance Detection" Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.101 Citation Details
Liu, Yujian and Zhang, Xinliang and Zou, Kaijian and Huang, Ruihong and Beauchamp, Nicholas and Wang, Lu "All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison" , 2023 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.957 Citation Details
Qiu, Changyuan and Wu, Winston and Zhang, Xinliang Frederick and Wang, Lu "Late Fusion with Triplet Margin Objective for Multimodal Ideology Prediction and Analysis" Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing , 2022 Citation Details
Qiu, Changyuan and Wu, Winston and Zhang, Xinliang Frederick and Wang, Lu "Late Fusion with Triplet Margin Objective for Multimodal Ideology Prediction and Analysis" , 2022 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.659 Citation Details
Zhang, Xinliang Frederick and Beauchamp, Nick and Wang, Lu "Generative Entity-to-Entity Stance Detection with Knowledge Graph Augmentation" Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) , 2022 Citation Details
Zhang, Xinliang Frederick and Beauchamp, Nick and Wang, Lu "Generative Entity-to-Entity Stance Detection with Knowledge Graph Augmentation" , 2022 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.676 Citation Details
Zou, Kaijian and Zhang, Xinliang and Wu, Winston and Beauchamp, Nicholas and Wang, Lu "Crossing the Aisle: Unveiling Partisan and Counter-Partisan Events in News Reporting" , 2023 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.45 Citation Details

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