Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing

Meghdut Sengupta, Roxanne El Baff, Milad Alshomary, Henning Wachsmuth

Abstract
Metaphorical language is a pivotal element inthe realm of political framing. Existing workfrom linguistics and the social sciences providescompelling evidence regarding the distinctivenessof conceptual framing for politicalideology perspectives. However, the nature andutilization of metaphors and the effect on audiencesof different political ideologies withinpolitical discourses are hardly explored. Toenable research in this direction, in this workwe create a dataset, originally based on newseditorials and labeled with their persuasive effectson liberals and conservatives and extend itwith annotations pertaining to metaphorical usageof language. To that end, first, we identifyall single metaphors and composite metaphors.Secondly, we provide annotations of the sourceand target domains for each metaphor. As aresult, our corpus consists of 300 news editorialsannotated with spans of texts containingmetaphors and the corresponding domains ofwhich these metaphors draw from. Our analysisshows that liberal readers are affected bymetaphors, whereas conservatives are resistantto them. Both ideologies are affected differentlybased on the metaphor source and targetcategory. For example, liberals are affected bymetaphors in the Darkness & Light (e.g., death)source domains, where as the source domain ofNature affects conservatives more significantly.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3621–3631
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.199
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.199
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meghdut Sengupta, Roxanne El Baff, Milad Alshomary, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2024. Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3621–3631, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing (Sengupta et al., NAACL 2024)
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