Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events

Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri, Nikhil Mehta, Siyi Liu, Sihao Chen, Daniel Hopkins, Dan Roth, Dan Goldwasser


Abstract
Analyzing ideological discourse even in the age of LLMs remains a challenge, as these models often struggle to capture the key elements that shape real-world narratives. Specifically, LLMs fail to focus on characteristic elements driving dominant discourses and lack the ability to integrate contextual information required for understanding abstract ideological views. To address these limitations, we propose a framework motivated by the theory of ideological discourse analysis to analyze news articles related to real-world events. Our framework represents the news articles using a relational structure−talking points, which captures the interaction between entities, their roles, and media frames along with a topic of discussion. It then constructs a vocabulary of repeating themes−prominent talking points, that are used to generate ideology-specific viewpoints (or partisan perspectives). We evaluate our framework’s ability to generate these perspectives through automated tasks−ideology and partisan classification tasks, supplemented by human validation. Additionally, we demonstrate straightforward applicability of our framework in creating event snapshots, a visual way of interpreting event discourse. We release resulting dataset and model to the community to support further research.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.32
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
575–594
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.32/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri, Nikhil Mehta, Siyi Liu, Sihao Chen, Daniel Hopkins, Dan Roth, and Dan Goldwasser. 2025. Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 575–594, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events (Nakshatri et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.32.pdf