Human Interest Framing across Cultures: A Case Study on Climate Change
Vallejo, Gisela de Kock, Christine Baldwin, Timothy Frermann, Lea
Vallejo, Gisela
de Kock, Christine
Baldwin, Timothy
Frermann, Lea
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Department
Natural Language Processing
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Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
Human Interest (HI) framing is a narrative strategy that injects news stories with a relatable, emotional angle and a human face to engage the audience. In this study we investigate the use of HI framing across different English-speaking cultures in news articles about climate change. Despite its demonstrated impact on the public’s behaviour and perception of an issue, HI framing has been under-explored in NLP to date. We perform a systematic analysis of HI stories to understand its role in climate change reporting in English-speaking countries from four continents. Our findings reveal key differences in how climate change is portrayed across countries, encompassing aspects such as narrative roles, article polarity, pronoun prevalence, and topics. We also demonstrate that these linguistic aspects boost the performance of fine-tuned pre-trained language models on HI story classification.
Citation
G. Vallejo, C. De Kock, T. Baldwin, and L. Frermann, “Human Interest Framing across Cultures: A Case Study on Climate Change,” 2025. Accessed: Mar. 12, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.754/
Source
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2025
Conference
Keywords
Human Interest framing, Cross-cultural analysis, Climate change reporting, Narrative roles, Linguistic features?
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Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics