Moral Framing in Politics (MFiP): A new resource and models for moral framing

Ines Rehbein, Ines Reinig, Simone Paolo Ponzetto


Abstract
The construct of morality permeates our entire lives and influences our behavior and how we perceive others. It therefore comes at no surprise that morality also plays an important role in politics, as morally framed arguments are perceived as more appealing and persuasive. Thus, being able to identify moral framing in political communication and to detect subtle differences in politicians’ moral framing can provide the basis for many interesting analyses in the political sciences. In the paper, we release MoralFramingInPolitics (MFiP), a new corpus of German parliamentary debates where the speakers’ moral framing has been coded, using the framework of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). Our fine-grained annotations distinguish different types of moral frames and also include narrative roles, together with the moral foundations for each frame. We then present models for frame type and moral foundation classification and explore the benefits of data augmentation (DA) and contrastive learning (CL) for the two tasks. All data and code will be made available to the research community.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1757
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
34631–34651
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1757/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Rehbein, Ines Reinig, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2025. Moral Framing in Politics (MFiP): A new resource and models for moral framing. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 34631–34651, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Moral Framing in Politics (MFiP): A new resource and models for moral framing (Rehbein et al., EMNLP 2025)
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