Goals of the Dagstuhl Seminar 22131. Framing has become recognised as a powerful communication strategy for winning debates and shaping opinions and decisions. Entman (1993) defines framing as an action of selecting “some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described”. Instead of engaging in costly and difficult exchanges of argument and counter-argument, a politician or a journalist can then try to reframe a dialogue on, for example, fracking from economic benefits to environmental hazards, or a dialogue on abortion from pro-life to pro-choice.

Introduced in 1960’s sociology, framing has been imported into communication sciences and media studies as an attempt to address the ways in which news is reported and, thus, a way in which to tackle manipulation and fake news. The topic has spread to other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, semantics, pragmatics, political science, journalism, and, most recently – to computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. This seminar aims to pave the way to synthesising definitions developed in these theoretically and empirically driven areas and then to operationalise them in computational and applied areas by means of cross-disciplinary hands-on exchanges in facilitated discussions. Our goal is to support the development of innovative technologies, which can help us to quantify framing phenomena, to study framing at scale, and to deploy computational techniques in order to intervene against malicious attempts to influence opinions and decisions of the general public.

Topics to be addressed during the Dagstuhl Seminar 22131. Framing, being less transparent at the linguistic surface, has seen only very few attempts on formal modelling so far. The proposers of this seminar are convinced, however, that a computational treatment of framing is a central next step – extending opinion and argument analysis – and its operationalisation calls for a deeper understanding of the term and the underlying mechanisms. Before computational theories can be formulated and applications be built, the potential contributions by the various relevant disciplines (sociology, political science, psychology, communication science, and others) should be studied carefully and assessed for potential common ground. This is the first area of the proposed seminar, and the second is the follow-up step of developing a roadmap for productive computational research toward the automatic identification of framing in text and speech, and modelling the connection to the underlying reasoning processes. To accomplish this, the seminar will address a range of topics, including:

• Argumentation theory, discourse analysis, rhetoric
• Journalism, political science, communication science
• Sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics
• Computational pragmatics and discourse modelling
• Computational social science and social media
• Computational models of argument and debating technologies

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Katarzyna Budzynska, Chris Reed, Manfred Stede, and Benno Stein

• Khalid Al-Khatib (University of Groningen, NL) [dblp]
• Liesbeth Allein (KU Leuven, BE)
• Alexander Bondarenko (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, DE)
• Katarzyna Budzynska (Warsaw University of Technology, PL) [dblp]
• Philipp Cimiano (Universität Bielefeld, DE) [dblp]
• Lucie Flek (Universität Marburg, DE)
• Anette Frank (Universität Heidelberg, DE) [dblp]
• Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, DE) [dblp]
• Ivan Habernal (TU Darmstadt, DE) [dblp]
• Annette Hautli-Janisz (Universität Passau, DE)
• Zlata Kikteva (Universität Passau, DE)
• Konrad Kiljan (University of Warsaw, PL)
• Christopher Klamm (Universität Mannheim, DE)
• Marcin Koszowy (Warsaw University of Technology, PL)
• Maud Oostindie (Maastricht University, NL)
• Steve Oswald (University of Fribourg, CH)
• John Parkinson (Maastricht University, NL)
• Martin Potthast (Universität Leipzig, DE) [dblp]
• Aniket Pramanick (TU Darmstadt, DE)
• Chris Reed (University of Dundee, GB) [dblp]
• Andrea Rocci (University of Lugano, CH)
• Arno Simons (DZWH - Berlin, DE)
• Wassiliki Siskou (Universität Konstanz, DE)
• Joanna Skolimowska (Warsaw University of Technology, PL)
• Noam Slonim (IBM - Haifa, IL) [dblp]
• Manfred Stede (Universität Potsdam, DE) [dblp]
• Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE) [dblp]
• Henning Wachsmuth (Universität Paderborn, DE) [dblp]