How Does the Language of ‘Threat’ Vary Across News Domains? A Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Understanding Narrative Components in News Contexts

Abstract

By identifying and characterising the narratives told in news media we can better understand political and societal processes. The problem is challenging from the perspective of natural language processing because it requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. This paper reports on work in progress, which aims to build a human-in-the-loop pipeline for analysing how the variation of narrative themes across different domains, based on topic modelling and word embeddings. As an illustration, we study the language associated with the threat narrative in British news media.