Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments

Matteo Guida, Yulia Otmakhova, Eduard Hovy, Lea Frermann


Abstract
Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work has shown that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health. We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.701
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14311–14326
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.701/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matteo Guida, Yulia Otmakhova, Eduard Hovy, and Lea Frermann. 2026. Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 14311–14326, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Article and Comment Frames Shape the Quality of Online Comments (Guida et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.701.pdf
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