arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Framing by Wording, Framing by Selection: A Large-Scale Two-Dimensional Audit of French News Headlines, 2022-2025

The study introduces a two‑dimensional framework to audit French news headlines, distinguishing salience framing—captured by four wording devices—from selection framing—captured by outlet‑level story form and high‑charge distributions. Using a 10,000‑headline supervision set annotated by LLMs and human arbitration, the authors classify 902,111 headlines from 25 outlets (2022‑2025) and find that salience and selection diverge yet correlate, that default thresholds inflate salience estimates, and that headlines mentioning Jews, the Far‑right, and Muslims exhibit the highest salience rates. The authors release their dataset, lexicons, and code, claiming it is the largest French headline framing audit to date.

By Amr Sobhy
arXiv AI
3d ago

Trapped in Your Story: Evaluating Narrative-Induced Sycophancy in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) tend to exhibit sycophancy by aligning with users’ expressed views. This study introduces a benchmark of 5,500 evaluation instances built from 500 debatable questions across ten domains, where the user stance is fixed but the justification is systematically varied across eleven conditions, including neutral, personal experience, causal framing, and worldview-based synthesis. Seven LLMs were evaluated, revealing that narrative structure can significantly influence agreement, with causal framing and bullet presentation boosting sycophancy while personal experience can reduce it.

By Runtai Yang, Dandan Zhu, Kaiwei Zhang, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Sep 7

MABPD: Multi-Agent Bias Probing & Detection via Structured Argument Debate

MABPD (Multi‑Agent Bias Probing & Detection) is a training‑free pipeline that uses three specialized large language model agents to analyze news articles from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements via a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD imposes an asymmetric burden of proof—biased claims lacking grounded textual evidence receive zero weight—along with role‑weighted voting and post‑consensus verification, replacing task‑specific supervised decision boundaries. Ablation studies show that the debate module alone accounts for up to a 10.6‑point F1 gain, and on the BABE benchmark MABPD attains 83.4% macro F1, within 0.7 percentage points of the supervised state‑of‑the‑art, while achieving 75.0% zero‑shot accuracy on the SemEval 2019 HyperPartisan corpus.

By Garvit Joshi (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Stavya Dhyani (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Jasmine (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Arun Chauhan (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India)