Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats

Heinrich P, Blombach A, Doan Dang B, Zilio L, Havenstein L, Dykes N, Evert S, Schäfer F (2024)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2024

Pages Range: 1932-1943

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Event location: Turin IT

URI: https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.173

Open Access Link: https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.173

Abstract

We are concerned with mapping the discursive landscape of conspiracy narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. In the present study, we analyse a corpus of more than 1,000 German Telegram posts tagged with 14 fine-grained conspiracy narrative labels by three independent annotators. Since emerging narratives on social media are short-lived and notoriously hard to track, we experiment with different state-of-the-art approaches to few-shot and zero-shot text classification. We report performance in terms of ROC-AUC and in terms of optimal F1, and compare fine-tuned methods with off-the-shelf approaches and human performance.

Authors with CRIS profile

Philipp Heinrich Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Andreas Blombach Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Bao Doan Dang Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Leonardo Zilio Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Linda Havenstein Lehrstuhl für Japanologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Japan der Moderne und Gegenwart Nathan Dykes Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Stephanie Evert Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Fabian Schäfer Lehrstuhl für Japanologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Japan der Moderne und Gegenwart

Related research project(s)

DFG-Projekt: Die Normalisierung rechtspopulistischer und neurechter Diskurse in Japan und Deutschland (NormRechts) April 1, 2022 - March 31, 2025 Tracking the infodemic: Conspiracy theories in the corona crisis April 1, 2021 - Sept. 30, 2022

How to cite

APA:

Heinrich, P., Blombach, A., Doan Dang, B., Zilio, L., Havenstein, L., Dykes, N.,... Schäfer, F. (2024). Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (pp. 1932-1943). Turin, IT.

MLA:

Heinrich, Philipp, et al. "Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats." Proceedings of the The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), Turin Ed. Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue, 2024. 1932-1943.

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