# EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [We Can Detect Your Bias: Predicting the Political Ideology of News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05338/) (2020)
- [In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02670/) (2019)
- [Framing and Agenda-setting in Russian News: a Computational Analysis of Intricate Political Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09386/) (2018)
- [Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04535/) (2021)
- [Salience-Aware Event Chain Modeling for Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10475/) (2021)
- [Text-based inference of moral sentiment change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07209/) (2020)
- [Identifying Conspiracy Theories News based on Event Relation Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18545/) (2023)
- [Discourse Structures Guided Fine-grained Propaganda Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18544/) (2023)
- [An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00608/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Explicit, Implicit, and Scattered: Revisiting Event Extraction to Capture Complex Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03594/) (2024)
- [Will Annotators Disagree? Identifying Subjectivity in Value-Laden Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06704/) (2025)
- [Multi-document Summarization through Multi-document Event Relation Graph Reasoning in LLMs: a case study in Framing Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12978/) (2025)
- [The Moralization Corpus: Frame-Based Annotation and Analysis of Moralizing Speech Acts across Diverse Text Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15248/) (2025)
- [News is More than a Collection of Facts: Moral Frame Preserving News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00657/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most previous research on moral frames has focused on social media short texts, little work has explored moral sentiment within news articles. In news articles, authors often express their opinions or political stance through moral judgment towards events, specifically whether the event is right or wrong according to social moral rules. This paper initiates a new task to understand moral opinions towards events in news articles. We have created a new dataset, EMONA, and annotated event-level moral opinions in news articles. This dataset consists of 400 news articles containing over 10k sentences and 45k events, among which 9,613 events received moral foundation labels. Extracting event morality is a challenging task, as moral judgment towards events can be very implicit. Baseline models were built for event moral identification and classification. In addition, we also conduct extrinsic evaluations to integrate event-level moral opinions into three downstream tasks. The statistical analysis and experiments show that moral opinions of events can serve as informative features for identifying ideological bias or subjective events.