Felix Hamborg

Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

In scientific publications, citations allow readers to assess the authenticity of the presented information and verify it in the original context. News articles, however, for various reasons do not contain citations and only rarely refer readers to further sources. As a result, readers often cannot assess the authenticity of the presented informati...

In a world overwhelmed with news, determining which information comes from reliable sources or how neutral is the reported information in the news articles poses a challenge to news readers. In this paper, we propose a methodology for automatically identifying bias by commission, omission, and source selection (COSS) as a joint threefold objective,...

This chapter concludes the doctoral thesis by summarizing the previously presented research (Sect. 7.1) and major contributions (Sect. 7.2). Lastly, the chapter discusses the limitations of the presented work and highlights ideas for future research (Sect. 7.3).

This chapter provides the first interdisciplinary literature review on media bias analysis, thereby contrasting manual and automated analysis approaches. Decade-long research in political science and other social sciences has resulted in comprehensive models to describe media bias and effective methods to analyze it. In contrast, in computer scienc...

This chapter details the first component of person-oriented framing analysis: target concept analysis. This component aims to find and resolve mentions of persons, which can be subject to media bias. The chapter introduces and discusses two approaches for this task. First, the chapter introduces an approach for event extraction. The approach extrac...

This chapter details the last component of person-oriented framing analysis: frame analysis. The component aims to classify how persons are portrayed in news articles. The chapter introduces and discusses two approaches for this task. First, it briefly presents an exploratory approach that aims to classify fine-grained categories of how persons are...

This chapter proposes person-oriented framing analysis (PFA), our approach to reveal biases. In a discussion of the solution space to tackle media bias, the chapter uses the findings of the literature review from Chap. 2 to narrow the research question from Chap. 1 down to a specific research objective. The PFA approach seeks to address this resear...

This chapter demonstrates the effectiveness of person-oriented framing analysis (PFA) by implementing and evaluating a prototypical system for bias identification and communication. In the single-blind setting of the evaluation, only the PFA prototype consistently, significantly, and most strongly increased respondents’ bias-awareness, i.e., respon...

Established cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) datasets contain event-centric coreference chains of events and entities with identity relations. These datasets establish strict definitions of the coreference relations across related tests but typically ignore anaphora with more vague context-dependent loose coreference relations. In this...

Datasets and methods for cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) focus on events or entities with strict coreference relations. They lack, however, annotating and resolving coreference mentions with more abstract or loose relations that may occur when news articles report about controversial and polarized events. Bridging and loose coreference...

Large amounts of annotated data have become more important than ever, especially since the rise of deep learning techniques. However, manual annotations are costly. We propose a tool that enables researchers to create large, high-quality, annotated datasets with only a few manual annotations, thus strongly reducing annotation cost and effort. For t...

Media coverage possesses a substantial effect on the public perception of events. The way media frames events can significantly alter the beliefs and perceptions of our society. Nevertheless, nearly all media outlets are known to report news in a biased way. While such bias can be introduced by altering the word choice or omitting information, the...

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. To automatically identify biased language, we present an exploratory approach that compares the context of related words. We train two word embedding models, one on texts of left-wing, the other on right-wing news outlets. Our hy...

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task that aims to resolve universal categories of named entities, e.g., persons, locations, organizations, and times. Despite its common and viable use in many use cases, NER is barely applicable in domains where general categories are suboptimal, such as engineering or medicine. To facilitate NER of d...

Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes three contributions to address this issue. First, we present a system for bias identification, which combines st...

Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its viable importance, news coverage has long been studied in the social sciences, resulting in comprehensive models...

In scientific publications, citations allow readers to assess the authenticity of the presented information and verify it in the original context. News articles, however, for various reasons do not contain citations and only rarely refer readers to further sources. As a result, readers often cannot assess the authenticity of the presented informati...

Datasets and methods for cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) focus on events or entities with strict coreference relations. They lack, however, annotating and resolving coreference mentions with more abstract or loose relations that may occur when news articles report about controversial and polarized events. Bridging and loose coreference...

Cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) datasets, such as ECB+, contain manually annotated event-centric mentions of events and entities that form coreference chains with identity relations. ECB+ is a state-of-the-art CDCR dataset that focuses on the resolution of events and their descriptive attributes, i.e., actors, location, and date-time....

Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes three contributions to address this issue. First, we present a system for bias identification, which combines st...

Media coverage possesses a substantial effect on the public perception of events. The way media frames events can significantly alter the beliefs and perceptions of our society. Nevertheless, nearly all media outlets are known to report news in a biased way. While such bias can be introduced by altering the word choice or omitting information, the...

Unsupervised concept identification through clustering, i.e., identification of semantically related words and phrases, is a common approach to identify contextual primitives employed in various use cases, e.g., text dimension reduction, i.e., replace words with the concepts to reduce the vocabulary size, summarization, and named entity resolution....

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Many researchers focus on automatically detecting and identifying media bias in the news, but only very few studies exist that systematically analyze how theses biases ca...

News is a central source of information for individuals to inform themselves on current topics. Knowing a news article's slant and authenticity is of crucial importance in times of "fake news," news bots, and centralization of media ownership. We introduce Newsalyze, a bias-aware news reader focusing on a subtle, yet powerful form of media bias, na...

Extensive research on target-dependent sentiment classification (TSC) has led to strong classification performances in domains where authors tend to explicitly express sentiment about specific entities or topics, such as in reviews or on social media. We investigate TSC in news articles, a much less researched domain, despite the importance of news...

Media has a substantial impact on public perception of events, and, accordingly, the way media presents events can potentially alter the beliefs and views of the public. One of the ways in which bias in news articles can be introduced is by altering word choice. Such a form of bias is very challenging to identify automatically due to the high conte...

Previous research on target-dependent sentiment classification (TSC) has mostly focused on reviews, social media, and other domains where authors tend to express sentiment explicitly. In this paper, we investigate TSC in news articles, a much less researched TSC domain despite the importance of news as an essential information source in individual...

Unsupervised concept identification through clustering, i.e., identification of semantically related words and phrases, is a common approach to identify contextual primitives employed in various use cases, e.g., text dimension reduction, i.e., replace words with the concepts to reduce the vocabulary size, summarization, and named entity resolution....

Extensive research on target-dependent sentiment classification (TSC) has led to strong classification performances in domains where authors tend to explicitly express sentiment about specific entities or topics, such as in reviews or on social media. We investigate TSC in news articles, a much less researched domain, despite the importance of news...

Many people consider news articles to be a reliable source of information on current events. However, due to the range of factors influencing news agencies, such coverage may not always be impartial. Media bias, or slanted news coverage, can have a substantial impact on public perception of events, and, accordingly, can potentially alter the belief...

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. To automatically identify biased language, we present an exploratory approach that compares the context of related words. We train two word embedding models, one on texts of left-wing, the other on right-wing news outlets. Our hy...

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. To automatically identify biased language, we present an exploratory approach that compares the context of related words. We train two word embedding models, one on texts of left-wing, the other on right-wing news outlets. Our hy...

Abstract. Many people consider news articles to be a reliable source of information on current events. However, due to the range of factors influencing news agencies, such coverage may not always be impartial. Media bias, or slanted news coverage, can have a substantial impact on public perception of events, and, accordingly, can potentially alter...

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. Models to identify and describe biases have been proposed across various scientific fields, focusing mostly on English media. In this paper, we propose a method for analyzing media bias in German media. We test different natural...

News is a central source of information for individuals to inform themselves on current topics. Knowing a news article's slant and authenticity is of crucial importance in times of "fake news," news bots, and centralization of media ownership. We introduce Newsalyze, a bias-aware news reader focusing on a subtle, yet powerful form of media bias, na...

Media bias describes differences in the content or presentation of news. It is an ubiquitous phenomenon in news coverage that can have severely negative effects on individuals and society. Identifying media bias is a challenging problem, for which current information systems offer little support. News aggregators are the most important class of sys...

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Many researchers focus on automatically detecting and identifying media bias in the news, but only very few studies exist that systematically analyze how theses biases ca...

News articles covering policy issues are an essential source of information in the social sciences and are also frequently used for other use cases, e.g., to train NLP language models. To derive meaningful insights from the analysis of news, large datasets are required that represent real-world distributions, e.g., with respect to the contained out...

In this paper, we show how selecting and combining encodings of natural and mathematical language affect classification and clustering of documents with mathematical content. We demonstrate this by using sets of documents, sections, and abstracts from the arXiv preprint server that are labeled by their subject class (mathematics, computer science,...

Slanted news coverage, also called media bias, can heavily influence how news consumers interpret and react to the news. Models to identify and describe biases have been proposed across various scientific fields, focusing mostly on English media. In this paper, we propose a method for analyzing media bias in German media. We test different natural...

Media bias, i.e., slanted news coverage, can strongly impact the public perception of the reported topics. In the social sciences, research over the past decades has developed comprehensive models to describe media bias and effective, yet often manual and thus cumbersome, methods for analysis. In contrast, in computer science fast, automated, and s...

In scientific publications, citations allow readers to assess the authenticity of the presented information and verify it in the original context. News articles, however, do not contain citations and only rarely refer readers to further sources. Readers often cannot assess the authenticity of the presented information as its origin is unclear. We p...

Event extraction from news articles is a commonly required prerequisite for various tasks, such as article summarization, article clustering, and news aggregation. Due to the lack of universally applicable and publicly available methods tailored to news da-tasets, many researchers redundantly implement event extraction methods for their own project...

We present an open source math-aware Question Answering System based on Ask Platypus. Our system returns as a single mathematical formula for a natural language question in English or Hindi. This formulae originate from the knowledge-base Wikidata. We translate these formulae to computable data by integrating the calculation engine sympy into our s...

Media bias can strongly impact the individual and public perception of news events. One difficult-to-detect, yet powerful form of slanted news coverage is bias by word choice and labeling (WCL). Bias by WCL can occur when journalists refer to the same concept , yet use different terms, which results in different sentiments being sparked in the read...

Media bias, i.e., slanted news coverage, can strongly impact the public perception of topics reported in the news. While the analysis of media bias has recently gained attention in computer science, the automated methods and results tend to be simple when compared to approaches and results in the social sciences, where researchers have studied medi...

Media bias, i.e., slanted news coverage, can strongly impact the public perception of topics reported in the news. While the analysis of media bias has recently gained attention in computer science, the automated methods and results tend to be simple when compared to approaches and results in the social sciences, where researchers have studied medi...

Purpose This paper aims to present an open source math-aware Question Answering System based on Ask Platypus. Design/methodology/approach The system returns as a single mathematical formula for a natural language question in English or Hindi. These formulae originate from the knowledge-based Wikidata. The authors translate these formulae to comput...

The identification and extraction of the events that news articles report on is a commonly performed task in the analysis workflow of various projects that analyze news articles. However, due to the lack of universally usable and publicly available methods for news articles, many researchers must redundantly implement methods for event extraction t...

Extraction of event descriptors from news articles is a commonly required task for various tasks, such as clustering related articles, summarization, and news aggregation. Due to the lack of generally usable and publicly available methods optimized for news, many researchers must redundantly implement such methods for their project. Answers to the...

This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first study on analyzing mathematical expressions to detect academic plagiarism. We make the following contributions. First, we investigate confirmed cases of plagiarism to categorize the similarities of mathematical content commonly found in plagiarized publications. From this investigation, we derive pos...

Mathematical formulae in academic texts significantly contribute to the overall semantic content of such texts, especially in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Knowing the definitions of the identifiers in mathematical formulae is essential to understand the semantics of the formulae. Similar to the sense-making proces...

The amount of news published and read online has increased tremendously in recent years, making news data an interesting resource for many research disciplines , such as the social sciences and linguistics. However, large scale collection of news data is cumbersome due to a lack of generic tools for crawling and extracting such data. We present new...

Depending on the news source, a reader can be exposed to a different narrative and conflicting perceptions for the same event. Today, news aggregators help users cope with the large volume of news published daily. However, aggregators focus on presenting shared information, but do not expose the different perspectives from articles on same topics....

Techniques are disclosed for determining reasons underlying insights gleaned from multi-dimensional data. In one embodiment, a contingency table is accessed that represents multiple dimensions of the data, in order to identify one or more insights. One or more dimensions, other than the represented dimensions, are evaluated to identify one or more...

A method and/or computer program product recovers files that are generated by an application running on a client-server system that comprises a back-up client with a client back-up tool and a server with a server back-up tool. Application files are backed up on the server, and then restored to a back-up client based on file usage behavior of the ap...

We present a novel interactive approach for the visual analysis of intonation contours. Audio data are processed algo-rithmically and presented to researchers through interactive visualizations. To this end, we automatically analyze the data using machine learning in order to find groups or patterns. These results are visualized with respect to met...