cs.CLOct 22, 2026

Mining Frames: Association Rule Mining as an Unsupervised Framework for News Framing Detection

Authors: Hager Hesham Mustafa

Organizations: Anmat Computational Analysis Lab

Read PDF
Ask AI
Cite

Copy citation

DOINot available for this paper

Abstract

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.

More in this topic

Association Rule Mining

See all 8 papers

Explore similar work

CardsList
May 29, 2026

Uncovering Temporal Framing in the News

Temporal language does more than place events on a timeline. In news discourse, references to the past, present, and future can function as rhetorical devices that shape interpretation and persuasion. Here, we study temporal framing, defined as the persuasive use of time-related language to structure meaning rather than to report chronology. We propose a taxonomy of eight temporal frames grounded in prior work on temporality and framing, and we realize it through expert annotation of a multilingual news corpus. The resulting dataset includes 458 English and German news articles, with over 2K temporally framed sentences and approximately 3K temporal framing annotations identified from a corpus of more than 20K sentences. We analyze frame prevalence, co-occurrence patterns, and lexical cues, and evaluate temporal framing detection using supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot classification. Our experiments show that temporal framing is learnable at the sentence level, with supervised models substantially outperforming zero-shot approaches. We publicly release the corpus to support future research on temporal framing: https://mbzuai-nlp.github.io/temporal-framing/.

Tarek Mahmoud, Veronika Solopova, Premtim Sahitaj +7

MBZUAI, UAE · Technische Universität Berlin, Germany · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany +1

Multilingual Text Classification
AskPDF
Aug 12, 2026

Framing by Wording, Framing by Selection: A Large-Scale Two-Dimensional Audit of French News Headlines, 2022-2025

News headlines frame public issues both by what they select and by how they word it, yet computational framing work typically collapses these operations into a single score. We introduce a two-dimensional framework that separates salience framing, measured through four wording devices (loaded vocabulary, blame attribution, threat framing, rhetorical question), from selection framing, measured through outlet-level story-form and high-charge distributions. We build a 10,000-headline French supervision set using three LLM annotators with majority-vote resolution and human arbitration, validate the labels against two annotator-independent blind human studies, and apply the strongest classifier to 902,111 deduplicated headlines from 25 French outlets (2022-2025). Three main findings emerge. First, salience and selection divergence are positively correlated yet leave nearly half of outlet-level variance unexplained, populating interpretively distinct off-diagonal cells in a four-cell outlet typology. Second, default classification thresholds systematically inflate corpus-level salience estimates; a precision-floor recalibration protocol corrects this distortion. Third, group-mention analysis reveals sharply unequal salience contexts: headlines mentioning Jews, the Far-right, and Muslims carry the highest detected salience rates, which broad event-context composition does not fully explain (residuals are descriptive, not same-event causal estimates; per-group lexicon precision is reported alongside). To our knowledge, this is the largest framing-focused French headline audit to date; we release the supervision set, lexicons, and analysis code.

Amr Sobhy

Le French News Lab

Political Discourse Analysis
AskPDF
Mar 27, 2026

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

Framing continues to remain one of the most extensively applied theories in political communication. Developments in computation, particularly with the introduction of transformer architecture and more so with large language models (LLMs), have naturally prompted scholars to explore various novel computational approaches, especially for deductive frame detection, in recent years. While many studies have shown that different transformer models outperform their preceding models that use bag-of-words features, the debate continues to evolve regarding how these models compare with each other on classification tasks. By placing itself at this juncture, this study makes three key contributions: First, it comparatively performs generic news frame detection and compares the performance of five BERT-based variants (BERT, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, DistilBERT and ALBERT) to add to the debate on best practices around employing computational text analysis for political communication studies. Second, it introduces various fine-tuned models capable of robustly performing generic news frame detection. Third, building upon numerous previous studies that work with US-centric data, this study provides the scholarly community with a labelled generic news frames dataset based on the Swiss electoral context that aids in testing the contextual robustness of these computational approaches to framing analysis.

Vihang Jumle

Political CommunicationTransformer
AskPDF