Uncovering Temporal Framing in the News

2026-05-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the rhetorical use of temporal language in news discourse, which often serves to guide interpretation and persuasion rather than merely convey chronological sequence. To this end, the authors propose the first fine-grained annotation scheme encompassing eight distinct temporal frames and construct a multilingual corpus of 458 English and German news articles containing over 2,000 expert-annotated sentences. Evaluating sentence-level temporal frame detection through both supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot classification, the results demonstrate that supervised models substantially outperform zero-shot approaches, confirming the learnability of temporal framing. The work further uncovers key lexical cues, co-occurrence patterns, and the persuasive functions of temporal expressions, offering novel resources and methodological foundations for multilingual news discourse analysis.

Abstract

Temporal language does more than place events on a timeline. In news discourse, references to the past, present, and future can function as rhetorical devices that shape interpretation and persuasion. Here, we study temporal framing, defined as the persuasive use of time-related language to structure meaning rather than to report chronology. We propose a taxonomy of eight temporal frames grounded in prior work on temporality and framing, and we realize it through expert annotation of a multilingual news corpus. The resulting dataset includes 458 English and German news articles, with over 2K temporally framed sentences and approximately 3K temporal framing annotations identified from a corpus of more than 20K sentences. We analyze frame prevalence, co-occurrence patterns, and lexical cues, and evaluate temporal framing detection using supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot classification. Our experiments show that temporal framing is learnable at the sentence level, with supervised models substantially outperforming zero-shot approaches. We publicly release the corpus to support future research on temporal framing: https://mbzuai-nlp.github.io/temporal-framing/.

Problem

• temporal framing
• news discourse
• rhetorical devices
• time-related language
• persuasion

Innovation

• temporal framing
• news discourse
• multilingual corpus
• supervised fine-tuning
• rhetorical devices