A Cross-Lingual Media Profiling Model for Detecting Factuality and Political Bias

Abstract

Media profiling offers valuable insights to enhance the objectivity and reliability of news coverage by providing comprehensive analysis, but the diversity in languages posed significant challenges to our identification of factuality and political bias of non-English sources. The limitation of existing media analysis research is its concentration on a singular high-resource language, and it hardly extends to languages beyond English. To address this, we introduce xMP, a dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual media profiling tasks. xMP’s cross-lingual test set encompasses 34 non-English languages and 18 language families, extending media profiling beyond English resources and allowing us to assess cross-lingual media profiling model performance. Additionally, we propose a method, named R-KAT, to enhance the model’s zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capability by building virtual multilingual embedding. Our experiments illustrate that our method improves the transferability of models in cross-lingual media profiling tasks. Additionally, we further discuss the performance of our method for different target languages. Our dataset and code are publicly available.

Keywords

• media profiling
• cross-lingual
• factuality
• political bias