Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts

Jack Merullo, Luke Yeh, Abram Handler, Alvin Grissom II, Brendan O’Connor, Mohit Iyyer

Abstract
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince commentator bias in sports broadcasts. To examine this phenomenon, we assemble FOOTBALL, which contains 1,455 broadcast transcripts from American football games across six decades that are automatically annotated with 250K player mentions and linked with racial metadata. We identify major confounding factors for researchers examining racial bias in FOOTBALL, and perform a computational analysis that supports conclusions from prior social science studies.
Anthology ID:
D19-1666
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6355–6361
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1666
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1666
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jack Merullo, Luke Yeh, Abram Handler, Alvin Grissom II, Brendan O’Connor, and Mohit Iyyer. 2019. Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6355–6361, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts (Merullo et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/D19-1666.pdf
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 D19-1666.Attachment.pdf
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 jmerullo/football
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