# To Bias or Not to Bias: Detecting bias in News with bias-detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13010/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)
- [Neural Media Bias Detection Using Distant Supervision With BABE -- Bias Annotations By Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14557/) (2022)
- [MBIC -- A Media Bias Annotation Dataset Including Annotator Characteristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11910/) (2021)
- [A Domain-adaptive Pre-training Approach for Language Bias Detection in News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10773/) (2022)
- [Enabling News Consumers to View and Understand Biased News Coverage: A Study on the Perception and Visualization of Media Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09640/) (2021)

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

- [LLM BiasScope: A Real-Time Bias Analysis Platform for Comparative LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12522/) (2026)
- [Explaining News Bias Detection: A Comparative SHAP Analysis of Transformer Model Decision Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23835/) (2025)
- [Does Welsh media need a review? Detecting bias in Nation.Cymru's political reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17628/) (2026)
- [HierBias: Context-Conditioned Hierarchical Media Bias Detection with Multi-Task Type Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26100/) (2026)
- [AutoJourn: Multi-Perspective Summarisation, Bias Detection and Bias Neutralisation for LLM-Generated News in Automated Journalism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18983/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Media bias detection is a critical task in ensuring fair and balanced information dissemination, yet it remains challenging due to the subjectivity of bias and the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. In this work, we perform sentence-level bias classification by fine-tuning a RoBERTa-based model on the expert-annotated BABE dataset. Using McNemar's test and the 5x2 cross-validation paired t-test, we show statistically significant improvements in performance when comparing our model to a domain-adaptively pre-trained DA-RoBERTa baseline. Furthermore, attention-based analysis shows that our model avoids common pitfalls like oversensitivity to politically charged terms and instead attends more meaningfully to contextually relevant tokens. For a comprehensive examination of media bias, we present a pipeline that combines our model with an already-existing bias-type classifier. Our method exhibits good generalization and interpretability, despite being constrained by sentence-level analysis and dataset size because of a lack of larger and more advanced bias corpora. We talk about context-aware modeling, bias neutralization, and advanced bias type classification as potential future directions. Our findings contribute to building more robust, explainable, and socially responsible NLP systems for media bias detection.