Large Scale Narrative Messaging around Climate Change: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Haiqi Zhou, David Hobson, Derek Ruths, Andrew Piper

Abstract
In this study, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to extract and analyze the latent narrative messaging in climate change-related news articles from North American and Chinese media. By defining “narrative messaging” as the intrinsic moral or lesson of a story, we apply our model to a dataset of approximately 15,000 news articles in English and Mandarin, categorized by climate-related topics and ideological groupings. Our findings reveal distinct differences in the narrative values emphasized by different cultural and ideological contexts, with North American sources often focusing on individualistic and crisis-driven themes, while Chinese sources emphasize developmental and cooperative narratives. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs in understanding and influencing climate communication, offering new insights into the collective belief systems that shape public discourse on climate change across different cultures.
Anthology ID:
2024.climatenlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Dominik Stammbach, Jingwei Ni, Tobias Schimanski, Kalyan Dutia, Alok Singh, Julia Bingler, Christophe Christiaen, Neetu Kushwaha, Veruska Muccione, Saeid A. Vaghefi, Markus Leippold
Venues:
ClimateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
143–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.climatenlp-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haiqi Zhou, David Hobson, Derek Ruths, and Andrew Piper. 2024. Large Scale Narrative Messaging around Climate Change: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024), pages 143–155, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Scale Narrative Messaging around Climate Change: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Zhou et al., ClimateNLP-WS 2024)
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