Identifying news videos' ideological perspectives using emphatic patterns of visual concepts

Television news has become the predominant way of understanding the world around us, but individual news broadcasters can frame or mislead an audience’s understanding of political and social issues. We are developing a computer system that can automatically identify highly biased television news and encourage audiences to seek news stories from contrasting viewpoints. But can computers identify the ideological perspective from which a news video was produced? We propose a method based on an empathic pattern of visual concepts: news broadcasters holding contrasting ideological beliefs appear to emphasize different subsets of visual concepts. We formalize the emphatic patterns and propose a statistical model. We evaluate the proposed model on a large broadcast news video archive with promising experimental results. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Content Analysis and Indexing; H.2.4 [Database Management]: Systems—Multimedia databases Ge...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MM
• Authors: Wei-Hao Lin, Alexander G. Hauptmann
• Keywords: Ideological Beliefs, Ideological Perspective, MM 2009, Visual Concepts