Frame Semantics for Social NLP in Italian: Analyzing Responsibility Framing in Femicide News Reports

We propose using a FrameNet-based ap- proach for analyzing how socially relevant events are framed in media discourses. Taking femicides as an example, we per- form a preliminary investigation on a large dataset of news reports and event data cov- ering recent femicides in Italy. First, we revisit the EVALITA 2011 shared task on Italian frame labeling, and test a recent multilingual frame semantic parser against this benchmark. Then, we experiment with specializing this model for Italian and perform a human evaluation to test our model’s real-world applicability. We show how FrameNet-based analyses can help to identify linguistic constructions that back- ground the agentivity and responsibility of femicide perpetrators in Italian news.