Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats
Philipp Heinrich, Andreas Blombach, Bao Minh Doan Dang, Leonardo Zilio, Linda Havenstein, Nathan Dykes, Stephanie Evert, Fabian Schäfer
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.173
- 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:
- 1932–1943
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.173
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Philipp Heinrich, Andreas Blombach, Bao Minh Doan Dang, Leonardo Zilio, Linda Havenstein, Nathan Dykes, Stephanie Evert, and Fabian Schäfer. 2024. Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 1932–1943, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Automatic Identification of COVID-19-Related Conspiracy Narratives in German Telegram Channels and Chats (Heinrich et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.173.pdf