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.

We use query results from manually designed corpus queries for fine-tuning an LLM to identify argumentative fragments as a text mining task. The resulting model outperforms both an LLM fine-tuned on a relatively large manually annotated gold standard of tweets as well as a rule-based approach. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the usefulness of corpus queries to generate training data for complex text categorisation tasks, especially if the targeted category has low prevalence (so that a manually annotated gold standard contains only a small number of positive examples).

The present paper outlines the projected second part of the Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF) family of standards: CQLF Ontology, which is currently in the process of standardization at the International Standards Organization (ISO), in its Technical Committee 37, Subcommittee 4 (TC37SC4) and its national mirrors. The first part of the family, ISO 24623-1 (henceforth CQLF Metamodel), was successfully adopted as an international standard at the beginning of 2018. The present paper reflects the state of the CQLF Ontology at the moment of submission for the Committee Draft ballot. We provide a brief overview of the CQLF Metamodel, present the assumptions and aims of the CQLF Ontology, its basic structure, and its potential extended applications. The full ontology is expected to emerge from a community process, starting from an initial version created by the authors of the present paper.

The EmpiriST corpus (Beißwenger et al., 2016) is a manually tokenized and part-of-speech tagged corpus of approximately 23,000 tokens of German Web and CMC (computer-mediated communication) data. We extend the corpus with manually created annotation layers for word form normalization, lemmatization and lexical semantics. All annotations have been independently performed by multiple human annotators. We report inter-annotator agreements and results of baseline systems and state-of-the-art off-the-shelf tools.

GeRedE is a 270 million token German CMC corpus containing approximately 380,000 submissions and 6,800,000 comments posted on Reddit between 2010 and 2018. Reddit is a popular online platform combining social news aggregation, discussion and micro-blogging. Starting from a large, freely available data set, the paper describes our approach to filter out German data and further pre-processing steps, as well as which metadata and annotation layers have been included so far. We explore the Reddit sphere, what makes the German data linguistically peculiar, and how some of the communities within Reddit differ from one another. The CWB-indexed version of our final corpus is available via CQPweb, and all our processing scripts as well as all manual annotation and automatic language classification can be downloaded from GitHub.

EmotiKLUE is a submission to the Implicit Emotion Shared Task. It is a deep learning system that combines independent representations of the left and right contexts of the emotion word with the topic distribution of an LDA topic model. EmotiKLUE achieves a macro average F₁score of 67.13%, significantly outperforming the baseline produced by a simple ML classifier. Further enhancements after the evaluation period lead to an improved F₁score of 68.10%.