Decoding News Narratives: A Critical Analysis of Large Language Models in Framing Bias Detection

This work contributes to the expanding research on the applicability of LLMs in social sciences by examining the performance of GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4, and Flan-T5 models in detecting framing bias in news headlines through zero-shot, few-shot, and explainable prompting methods. A key insight from our evaluation is the notable efficacy of explainable prompting in enhancing the reliability of these models, highlighting the importance of explainable settings for social science research on framing bias. GPT-4, in particular, demonstrated enhanced performance in few-shot scenarios when presented with a range of relevant, in-domain examples. FLAN-T5's poor performance indicates that smaller models may require additional task-specific fine-tuning for identifying framing bias detection. Our study also found that models, particularly GPT-4, often misinterpret emotional language as an indicator of framing bias, underscoring the challenge of distinguishing between reporting genuine emotional expression and intentionally use framing bias in news headlines. We further evaluated the models on two subsets of headlines where the presence or absence of framing bias was either clear-cut or more contested, with the results suggesting that these models' can be useful in flagging potential annotation inaccuracies within existing or new datasets. Finally, the study evaluates the models in real-world conditions ("in the wild"), moving beyond the initial dataset focused on U.S. Gun Violence, assessing the models' performance on framed headlines covering a broad range of topics.