Visual Framing for News Stance Detection via Image Generation

Abstract:Article-level news stance detection aims to identify the perspective of news articles toward social issues. Despite advances in stance detection and its importance for trustworthy media environments, news articles pose distinct challenges because their stances are often implicit, subtly conveyed through journalistic framing, and embedded in long, structurally complex texts. To address these challenges, we introduce VFStance, which leverages visual framing to make implicit stance cues more explicit via image generation. In evaluation experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VFStance over existing methods and the contribution of visual framing to its performance. Finally, a controlled user study (N=200) in a snippet-based news consumption setting further demonstrates that VFStance can make stance signals visually salient and highlights its potential use beyond automated stance detection.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2609.00685 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.00685v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00685 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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