DocNet: Semantic Structure in Inductive Bias Detection Models

Abstract: News will be biased so long as people have opinions. As social media becomes the primary entry point for news and partisan differences increase, it is increasingly important for informed citizens to be able to recognize bias. If people are aware of the biases of the news they consume, they will be able to take action to avoid polarizing echo chambers. In this paper, we explore an often overlooked aspect of bias detection in media: the semantic structure of news articles. We present DocNet, a novel, inductive, and low-resource document embedding and political bias detection model. We also demonstrate that the semantic structure of news articles from opposing political sides, as represented in document-level graph embeddings, have significant similarities. DocNet bypasses the need for pre-trained LLMs, reducing resource dependency while achieving comparable performance. It can be used to advance political bias detection in low-resource environments. Our code and data are made available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DocNet/