TY - GEN

T1 - Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing

AU - Sengupta, Meghdut

AU - El Baff, Roxanne

AU - Alshomary, Milad

AU - Wachsmuth, Henning

N1 - Publisher Copyright: ©2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.

PY - 2024/6

Y1 - 2024/6

N2 - Metaphorical language is a pivotal element in the realm of political framing. Existing work from linguistics and the social sciences provides compelling evidence regarding the distinctiveness of conceptual framing for political ideology perspectives. However, the nature and utilization of metaphors and the effect on audiences of different political ideologies within political discourses are hardly explored. To enable research in this direction, in this work we create a dataset, originally based on news editorials and labeled with their persuasive effects on liberals and conservatives and extend it with annotations pertaining to metaphorical usage of language. To that end, first, we identify all single metaphors and composite metaphors. Secondly, we provide annotations of the source and target domains for each metaphor. As a result, our corpus consists of 300 news editorials annotated with spans of texts containing metaphors and the corresponding domains of which these metaphors draw from. Our analysis shows that liberal readers are affected by metaphors, whereas conservatives are resistant to them. Both ideologies are affected differently based on the metaphor source and target category. For example, liberals are affected by metaphors in the Darkness & Light (e.g., death) source domains, where as the source domain of Nature affects conservatives more significantly.

AB - Metaphorical language is a pivotal element in the realm of political framing. Existing work from linguistics and the social sciences provides compelling evidence regarding the distinctiveness of conceptual framing for political ideology perspectives. However, the nature and utilization of metaphors and the effect on audiences of different political ideologies within political discourses are hardly explored. To enable research in this direction, in this work we create a dataset, originally based on news editorials and labeled with their persuasive effects on liberals and conservatives and extend it with annotations pertaining to metaphorical usage of language. To that end, first, we identify all single metaphors and composite metaphors. Secondly, we provide annotations of the source and target domains for each metaphor. As a result, our corpus consists of 300 news editorials annotated with spans of texts containing metaphors and the corresponding domains of which these metaphors draw from. Our analysis shows that liberal readers are affected by metaphors, whereas conservatives are resistant to them. Both ideologies are affected differently based on the metaphor source and target category. For example, liberals are affected by metaphors in the Darkness & Light (e.g., death) source domains, where as the source domain of Nature affects conservatives more significantly.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85199912201&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Conference contribution

SN - 979-889176114-8

T3 - Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2024

SP - 3621

EP - 3631

BT - Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A2 - Duh, Kevin

A2 - Gomez, Helena

A2 - Bethard, Steven

CY - Mexico City, Mexico

T2 - 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Y2 - 16 June 2024 through 21 June 2024

ER -