In this paper, we describe our attempt to learn bias from news articles. From our experiments, it seems that although there is a correlation between publisher bias and article bias, it is challenging to learn bias directly from the publisher labels. On the other hand, using few manually-labeled samples can increase the accuracy metric from around 60% to near 80%. Our system is computationally inexpensive and uses several standard document representations in NLP to train an SVM or LR classifier. The system ranked 4th in the SemEval-2019 task. The code is released for reproducibility.

A corpus called DutchParl is created which aims to contain all digitally available parliamentary documents written in the Dutch language. The first version of DutchParl contains documents from the parliaments of The Netherlands, Flanders and Belgium. The corpus is divided along three dimensions: per parliament, scanned or digital documents, written recordings of spoken text and others. The digital collection contains more than 800 million tokens, the scanned collection more than 1 billion. All documents are available as UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. The corpus is available for download in several formats. The corpus can be used for corpus-linguistic and political science research, and is suitable for performing scalability tests for XML information systems.