Understanding media narratives with machine learning and NLP

Storytelling and narrative crafting are central to communication techniques -- so much so that they drive the way news media, advertising, and public relations operate today. But the way narratives are used in these communications, as well as how they impact the opinions of individuals or an entire society, is extremely complex and difficult to express with any specificity. A new project at the University of Michigan supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) aims to use computational tools to conceptualize these narratives and the impact they have on readers. "It remains unclear how to effectively represent and extract narratives at scale," says Computer Science and Engineering Prof. Lu Wang, the project's lead investigator, "and little is known about how they interact with people's inclination to have an impact and confirm their own values." This uncertainty stems from the problem's scope: understanding the narratives used in news media, for example, and how they affect millions of unique individuals involves countless variables.