Automatic Identification of COVID-19-related 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 Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2024

Publisher: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

Pages Range: 1932-1943

Conference Proceedings Title: LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings

Event location: Torino IT

ISBN: 9782493814104

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 manually tagged with 14 conspiracy and conspiracy-related 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 Professur für Digital Humanities mit Schwerpunkt Computing Text and Language Stephanie Evert Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Fabian Schäfer Lehrstuhl für Japanologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Japan der Moderne und Gegenwart

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 Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue (Eds.), LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings (pp. 1932-1943). Torino, IT: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

MLA:

Heinrich, Philipp, et al. "Automatic Identification of COVID-19-related Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats." Proceedings of the Joint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024, Torino Ed. Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2024. 1932-1943.

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