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

Heinrich P, Blombach A, Doan Dang BM, 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.

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APA:

Heinrich, P., Blombach, A., Doan Dang, B.M., 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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