Uncovering Social Changes of the Basque Speaking Twitter Community During COVID-19 Pandemic

Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Iker García-Ferrero, Ander Salaberria, Jon Ander Campos

Abstract
The aim of this work is to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Basque speaking Twitter community by applying Natural Language Processing unsupervised techniques. In order to carry out this study, we collected and publicly released the biggest dataset of Basque tweets containing up to 8M tweets from September 2019 to February 2021. To analyze the impact of the pandemic, the variability of the content over time was studied through quantitative and qualitative analysis of words and emojis. For the quantitative analysis, the shift at the frequency of the terms was calculated using linear regression over frequencies. On the other hand, for the qualitative analysis, word embeddings were used to study the changes in the meaning of the most significant words and emojis at different periods of the pandemic. Through this multifaceted approach, we discovered noteworthy alterations in the political inclinations exhibited by Basque users throughout the course of the pandemic.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigul-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Maite Melero, Sakriani Sakti, Claudia Soria
Venues:
SIGUL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
363–371
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigul-1.44
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Iker García-Ferrero, Ander Salaberria, and Jon Ander Campos. 2024. Uncovering Social Changes of the Basque Speaking Twitter Community During COVID-19 Pandemic. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 363–371, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Uncovering Social Changes of the Basque Speaking Twitter Community During COVID-19 Pandemic (Fernandez de Landa et al., SIGUL-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.sigul-1.44.pdf
PDF Search