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

News media play a central role in shaping public perceptions of climate change, and whether coverage emphasizes threats or solutions has measurable effects on audience engagement and policy support. Automated detection of these framing patterns at the sentence level would allow researchers to analyze large corpora that are infeasible to code manually. We present a systematic comparison of two approaches for classifying sentences from German-language climate news articles as threat-oriented, solution-oriented, both, or neither. The first approach uses few-shot prompting with an open-weights large language model (Llama 4 Maverick), employing chain-of-thought reasoning and structured output with confidence scoring. The second approach fine-tunes a German BERT model (deepset/gbert-large) for sentence-pair classification, where the preceding sentence provides contextual information for the target sentence. Both approaches implement two independent binary classifiers, one for threat framing and one for solution framing. We evaluate both methods on a corpus of 440 Austrian newspaper articles that were manually coded following a detailed coding scheme developed with domain experts. The fine-tuned BERT classifiers achieve an F1 score of 0.83 for both the threat and solution tasks, while the LLM-based classifiers reach an F1 of 0.78. An ablation study confirms that providing the preceding sentence as context improves BERT classification performance substantially compared to single-sentence input. These results contribute to the growing body of work comparing fine-tuned encoder models with prompted generative models for text classification in computational social science.

Political scientists increasingly face a consequential choice when adopting natural language processing tools: build a domain-specific model from scratch, borrow and adapt an existing one, or simply fine-tune a general-purpose model on task data? Each approach occupies a different point on the spectrum of performance, cost, and required expertise, yet the discipline has offered little empirical guidance on how to navigate this trade-off. This paper provides such guidance. Using conflict event classification as a test case, I fine-tune ModernBERT on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to create Confli-mBERT and systematically compare it against ConfliBERT, a domain-specific pretrained model that represents the current gold standard. Confli-mBERT achieves 75.46% accuracy compared to ConfliBERT's 79.34%. Critically, the four-percentage-point gap is not uniform: on high-frequency attack types such as Bombing/Explosion (F1 = 0.95 vs. 0.96) and Kidnapping (F1 = 0.92 vs. 0.91), the models are nearly indistinguishable. Performance differences concentrate in rare event categories comprising fewer than 2% of all incidents. I use these findings to develop a practical decision framework for political scientists considering any NLP-assisted research task: when does the research question demand a specialized model, and when does an accessible fine-tuned alternative suffice? The answer, I argue, depends not on which model is "better" in the abstract, but on the specific intersection of class prevalence, error tolerance, and available resources. The model, training code, and data are publicly available on Hugging Face.

Computational framing analysis is dominated by supervised classifiers that require large annotated corpora and predefined frame taxonomies, limiting their use for non-English languages, novel events, and low-resource settings. This paper presents Association Rule Mining (ARM) as an unsupervised, annotation-free framework for news framing detection. Each document or sentence is treated as a transaction of lexical items, and high-lift co-occurrence rules are read as candidate framing signals (Gamson and Modigliani's condensing symbols), confirmed in context by journalist-researchers. The primary validation is Framing Gaza: 25,512 English-language articles from 16 US, UK, French, and German outlets covering the first year of the Gaza war (October 2023 to October 2024), analyzed with Apriori (mlxtend), platform-weighted support, POS-filtered n-grams, and lift-based scoring. ARM inductively surfaces interpretable patterns without predefined categories: a cross-platform military frame, {israeli, strike} to {kill}, appears as a closed rule in 14 of 16 outlets, and a month-by-month analysis recovers event-driven framing pivots (e.g., the April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike) with no prior event labeling. A systematic headline-body divergence is identified, with headlines carrying concentrated, high-lift editorial framing and body text reproducing institutional, procedural language. A methodological validation on the Seven Days project (1,575 Arabic articles on the 2026 Iran war) shows that FP-Growth enables sentence-level analysis with far lower memory overhead. Findings were validated through editorial uptake: two published investigative stories (Daraj Media; Saheeh Masr). Preprocessing code is released openly; the full pipeline is documented but withheld to preserve operational deployability.