We present DNIPRO, a corpus of 246K news articles from the Russo-Ukrainian war (Feb 2022 – Aug 2024) spanning eleven outlets across five nation-states (Russia, Ukraine, U.S., U.K., China) and three languages. The corpus features comprehensive metadata and human-evaluated annotations for stance, sentiment, and topical framing, enabling systematic analysis of competing geopolitical narratives. It is uniquely suited for empirical studies of narrative divergence, media framing, and information warfare. Our exploratory analyses reveal how media outlets construct incompatible realities through divergent attribution and topical selection without direct refutation of opposing narratives. dnipro empowers empirical research on narrative evolution, cross-lingual information flow, and computational detection of implicit contradictions in fragmented information ecosystems.

Language model training and inference ignore a fundamental linguistic fact: there is a dependence between multiple sequences of text written by the same person. Prior work has shown that addressing this form of ecological fallacy can greatly improve the performance of multiple smaller (~124M) GPT-based models. In this work, we ask if addressing the ecological fallacy by modeling the author’s language context with a specific LM task (called HuLM) can provide similar benefits for a larger-scale model, an 8B Llama model. To this end, we explore variants that process an author’s language in the context of their other temporally ordered texts. We study the effect of pre-training with this author context using the HuLM objective, as well as using it during fine-tuning with author context (HuFT:Human-aware Fine-Tuning). Empirical comparisons show that addressing the ecological fallacy during fine-tuning alone using QLoRA improves the performance of the larger 8B model over standard fine-tuning. Additionally, QLoRA-based continued HuLM pre-training results in a human-aware model generalizable for improved performance over eight downstream tasks with linear task classifier training alone. These results indicate the utility and importance of modeling language in the context of its original generators, the authors.