PopAut: An Annotated Corpus for Populism Detection in Austrian News Comments

Ahmadou Wagne, Julia Neidhardt, Thomas Elmar Kolb

Abstract
Populism is a phenomenon that is noticeably present in the political landscape of various countries over the past decades. While populism expressed by politicians has been thoroughly examined in the literature, populism expressed by citizens is still underresearched, especially when it comes to its automated detection in text. This work presents the PopAut corpus, which is the first annotated corpus of news comments for populism in the German language. It features 1,200 comments collected between 2019-2021 that are annotated for populist motives anti-elitism, people-centrism and people-sovereignty. Following the definition of Cas Mudde, populism is seen as a thin ideology. This work shows that annotators reach a high agreement when labeling news comments for these motives. The data set is collected to serve as the basis for automated populism detection using machine-learning methods. By using transformer-based models, we can outperform existing dictionaries tailored for automated populism detection in German social media content. Therefore our work provides a rich resource for future work on the classification of populist user comments in the German language.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12879–12892
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1128
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmadou Wagne, Julia Neidhardt, and Thomas Elmar Kolb. 2024. PopAut: An Annotated Corpus for Populism Detection in Austrian News Comments. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12879–12892, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
PopAut: An Annotated Corpus for Populism Detection in Austrian News Comments (Wagne et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.lrec-main.1128.pdf
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