Abstract
Usage of presuppositions in social media and news discourse can be a powerful way to influence the readers as they usually tend to not examine the truth value of the hidden or indirectly expressed information. Fairclough and Wodak (1997) discuss presupposition at a discourse level where some implicit claims are taken for granted in the explicit meaning of a text or utterance. From the Gricean perspective, the presuppositions of a sentence determine the class of contexts in which the sentence could be felicitously uttered. This paper aims to correlate the type of knowledge presupposed in a news article to the bias present in it. We propose a set of guidelines to identify various kinds of presuppositions in news articles and present a dataset consisting of 1050 articles which are annotated for bias (positive, negative or neutral) and the magnitude of presupposition. We introduce a supervised classification approach for detecting bias in political news which significantly outperforms the existing systems.
Highlights
In today’s situation where we see several instances of social media being used to interfere with politics in controversial ways, the platforms that have been considered as sources of information are often seen as politically biased
We aim to establish a correlation between presupposition and bias in political news articles, and use the knowledge of presupposition to enhance the task of automatic bias detection
It can be see that the density of the articles decreases as we move up in case of unbiased articles, with most of them being in the 0.15 - 0.3 range, and no articles were observed with a value higher than 0.6
Summary
In today’s situation where we see several instances of social media being used to interfere with politics in controversial ways, the platforms that have been considered as sources of information are often seen as politically biased. In newspapers and news websites, sometimes the reporters tend emphasize more on particular view points selectively, and present biased information which is aligned with their personal political ideology. This can lead to widespread alteration of mass political opinion and impact the decision of the voters. Consider the utterance “Sam will visit California again”. This utterance presupposes that Sam has visited California before, and asserts that he will visit once again in future
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