=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3370/paper16
|storemode=property
|title=A Cognitive Theoretical Approach of Rhetorical News Analysis
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3370/paper16.pdf
|volume=Vol-3370
|authors=Ishrat Sami,Tony Russell-Rose,Larisa Soldatova
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecir/SamiRS23
}}
==A Cognitive Theoretical Approach of Rhetorical News Analysis==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3370/paper16.pdf
A Cognitive Theoretical Approach of Rhetorical
News Analysis (WIP)
Ishrat Rahman Sami1 , Dr Tony Russell-Rose1 and Prof. Larisa Soldatova1
1
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW
Abstract
The storytelling narrative is the key to conveying an author's opinion and argument about a specific topic
to intended readers. A good narrative not only conveys the underlying message but also leads readers
to a better conceptual understanding of the discussed topic. Stories play a vital role in understanding
through their chronological style of reporting. Similarly, to gain readers’ attention from beginning to
end, news agencies generally adopt an inverted pyramid structure where a story starts with stating
the most important material. The facts of news are encapsulated in five basic questions Who, Where,
What, When and Why which are fundamental for any news readers' understanding. Distributions of
the categorical facts of the news correlate to the answers to What, When, Where and Who questions
and the answer to Why is correlated to the authors' argumentation and evidence. In this paper, we
presented a theory of mapping 5Ws and Aristotle's Rhetoric into the format of Joseph Campbell's The
Hero's Journey as a structural story template to assist in automatic understanding of the structure of
news and evaluated the approach via cognitive reading and writing user experiment tasks.
Keywords
Narrative Representation, Storytelling, Visualization
1. Introduction
Authors preserve their rhetoric, creativity and knowledge in stories. News writing falls under
the genre of storytelling [1]. The story planning of the news material before writing aids speed,
accuracy and influence via controlled information flow [2]. Throughout centuries, Aristotle's
Rhetoric has guided writers to create effective communication using Ethos, Logos and Pathos
[3] [4]. Ethos is the art of establishing authority on a document considering state-of-the-art
knowledge regarding its topic. Logos is building logical argumentation to explain the authors’
viewpoint of the topic. Pathos is an attempt to persuade the readers emotionally toward the
intended goal to consider required actions. It is the rhetoric that brings cognitive structure to
natural language documents[3]. Following this path of persuasive writing, professional authors
use various structural story templates to plan the core message that needs to be conveyed
to audiences. One such popular and successful structural story template of the 20th century
is Joseph Campbell's “The Hero's Journey” [5]. It involves the main character going on an
adventure, facing challenges, learning a lesson and winning with the new found knowledge
In: R. Campos, A. Jorge, A. Jatowt, S. Bhatia, M. Litvak (eds.): Proceedings of the Text2Story’23 Workshop, Dublin
(Republic of Ireland), 2-April-2023
Envelope-Open isami001@gold.ac.uk (I. R. Sami); t.russell-rose@gold.ac.uk (D. T. Russell-Rose); l.soldatova@gold.ac.uk
(Prof. L. Soldatova)
© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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151
(a) 5Ws mapping into The Hero's Journey template. (b)Sequential author's rhetorical mapping.
Figure 1: Distribution of the author's rhetorical view throughout various sections of news.
before returning home as presented in Figure 1 (a). To win readers’ attention, a journalist must
expose the Who, Where, What, When and Why of a news story consciously [6]. Missing
any of the 5Ws is referred to as holes in journalism [6]. This article theoretically mapped
5Ws and Aristotle's Rhetoric into The Hero's Journey to experiment with the potential of
story plan extraction as shown in Figure 1 (b). Based on this theoretical mapping we extracted
story words from the news and visualized the words. The visualization was put into a user
behavioural experiment to understand the cognitive richness of the proposed representation.
This paper presents our cognitive reading and writing task-based experiment on 32 participants
of university students, staff and teachers. It also compared text-based tasks against visualization-
based tasks.
2. Related Work
Considering the speed and amount of new information along with the rise of fake news,
fact-checking the news content and its rhetoric has become a big challenge during news
analysis. To automatically predict the veracity of claims in news, researchers have been using
techniques based on natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation
and databases [7]. The authors of fake news aim to excite the sentiments of the readers towards
the intended goal [8]. Therefore, to determine the polarity and strength of sentiments expressed
in fake news, various knowledge-based, context-based and content-based sentiment analysis
approaches are used to detect fake news [8]. Some news sentiment analysis systems assign
scores indicating positive or negative opinions to each topic in the corpus using statistical
analysis on sentiment cues [9]. Some systems use deep learning methodologies of recurrent
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(a) Story words mapping based on the word categories (b) Sample story plan visualization of a sample
news
Figure 2: Mapping and visualizing story words into the author's rhetorical mapping theory.
neural networks with long short-term memory units for forecasting from news archives [10].
News, articles and books convey authors's rhetoric of the author about the topics discussed
in the document. In this paper, we employed story templates based on terms extraction to
understand the rhetoric of the author and validated it using user experiments. This can be used
in rhetoric-based fact-checking in future studies.
3. Theory
News, articles and books are a rich communication medium that preserves authors' rhetoric
through Ethos, Logos and Pathos which triggers readers' cognitive thinking for learning. The
facts of a document are encapsulated in six basic questions Who, Where, What, When, Why
and How. In Figure 1 (b), we proposed a theoretical distribution of rhetorical questions along
the sequential structure of news using The Hero's Journey template. Following this template
diagram, we visualized the automatically extracted authors' plan in a clockwise circular pattern
using the D3 circular bar plot [11] as shown in Figure 2 (b). The concept of known and unknown
is also inspired by this template. This is a factual distribution encapsulating the answer to
categorical facts of the news What, When, Where and Who. The answer to Why and How is
correlated to the authors' argumentation and evidence. We also mapped Aristotle's Rhetoric
into this format for the news as shown in Figure 2 (a). To establish Ethos, at the beginning
of the document, from title to introduction, the author explains the topic/What, the problem
area/Where and the main characters/Who related to the story. To establish Logos in the body
of the document, the authors attempt to explain Why and How. For enriching/educating the
reader, in the conclusion the author attempts to establish Pathos by stating the current situation
of the event and by addressing future issues. Information about When of news is related to its
date attribute.
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Table 1
Scale of cognition
Criterion Scale of cognition
Who 0-2 where 0 = wrongly understood … 2 = well understood
Where 0-2 where 0 = wrongly understood … 2 = well understood
What 0-2 where 0 = wrongly understood … 2 = well understood
When 0-1 where 0 = wrongly understood, 1 = understood
Why 0-2 where 0 = wrongly understood … 2 = well understood
Is summary interpretation true 0-1 where 0 = false, 1 = true
Quality of summary 1-5 where 0 = poor … 5 = well written
We used an archive of pharmaceutical news from a website for analysis. The information
extraction philosophy from a news document for this demo is based on our skimming technique.
Word is the atomic unit of processing. This technique processes all sentences from top to bottom
for extracting story words. We split news into M (5) blocks along document length and focus on
multiple block appearances of selected words. Story words are extracted from the news based
on four categories.
• Wtopic : Most frequent N words that appear in all blocks.
• Wforward : Words that have the highest forward position weight. If a word appears earlier
(based on sentence position) in the document it gets a higher weight.
• Wmiddle : Words that appear in more than M / 2 blocks.
• Wbackward : Words that have the highest backward position weight. If a word appears
later(based on sentence position) in the document it gets a higher weight.
Figure 2 (a) displays how the four categories of words are assembled for visualization using a
circular bar chart and Figure 2 (b) demonstrated an example news.
The radial bars show the forward weight of the story words measured from the centre. We
have classified the positive and negative nouns based on two static lists of words. The categorical
classification of persons and locations came from the categorical information provided by Google
Knowledge Graph API [12].
4. Cognitive reading and writing experiment
The theoretical mapping is evaluated via an online participation-based controlled experiment.
We scored understanding factors of readers' cognition based on comprehension tasks using
a homogeneous group of 32 participants. We followed the within-group experiment design.
Each participant was given four comprehension tasks. The order of the tasks was generated
using Latine Square Design. Each participant responded to these questions: ”When did the
incident take place?”, ”Who are the main character(s)/role player(s) of the story?”, ”Where
did the story take place?”, ”Why is the story important?”, ”Write a summary of the story in
a few sentences” and ”Ease of comprehension”. We invited 3 academic reviewers to blindly
score the comprehension tasks. Apart from ease of the task and task time scores, the rest of
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Table 2
Experiment results
Criterion Text(mean) Visualization(mean) P-value Hypothesis testing with p = 0.05
Who 1.31 1.03 0.0175619 Reject null hypothesis
Where 1.80 1.47 0.0000929 Reject null hypothesis
What 1.63 1.53 0.2633649 Can’t reject null hypothesis
When 0.66 0.55 0.1820127 Can’t reject null hypothesis
Why 1.31 1.28 0.7512205 Can’t reject null hypothesis
Is summary interpretation true 0.95 0.78 0.0019375 Reject null hypothesis
Quality of summary 3.03 2.39 0.0001664 Reject null hypothesis
Completion time 8.53 minutes 7.35 minutes 0.0182290 Reject null hypothesis
Ease 3.84 2.68 0.0000003 Reject null hypothesis
the questions were scored by the reviewers based on model answers and following the scales
in Table 1. We performed a paired t-test on the average scores of text-based comprehension
tasks against the average scores of visualization-based comprehension tasks. The result is
reported in Table 2. According to Table 2 we have achieved 95% confidence in the reported
result on all criteria apart from What, When and Why. The result demonstrates that the
current state of representation is providing close cognition scores. This reveals the fact that
within the context of visualization-as-summarization, the mapping offers a benefit due to the
more compact representation.
5. Conclusion
An automatic understanding of authors’ rhetoric can be extremely useful for comprehensive
tasks like abstract summarization or strategic story plan visualization during the learning and
teaching process. Topic models [13] help us to analyze the news based on What the news
is about. Name entity recognition [14] systems and classifiers [15] can help us to analyze
news based on Where and Who. News timeline helps us to analyze the When. Story plan
templates like Aristotle's Rhetoric, The Hero's Journey and 5Ws can aid extraction of the
main story words for analyzing news by Why and How along with Who, Where, When,
What. The evaluation of our theoretical mapping demonstrated a close human understanding
of the compressed representation when compared to the whole text task results.
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