We investigate the feasibility of defining sentiment evoked by fine-grained news events. Our research question is based on the premise that methods for detecting implicit sentiment in news can be a key driver of content diversity, which is one way to
mitigate the detrimental effects of filter bubbles that recommenders based on collaborative filtering may produce. Our experiments are based on 1,735 news articles from major Flemish newspapers that were manually annotated, with high agreement, for implicit sentiment. While lexical resources prove insufficient for sentiment analysis in this data genre, our results demonstrate that machine learning models based on SVM and BERT are able to automatically infer the implicit sentiment evoked by news events.
In this paper, we describe experiments designed to evaluate the impact of stylometric and emotion-based features on hate speech detection: the task of classifying textual content into hate or non-hate speech classes. Our experiments are conducted for
three languages -- English, Slovene, and Dutch -- both in in-domain and cross-domain setups, and aim to investigate hate speech using features that model two linguistic phenomena: the writing style of hateful social media content operationalized as function word usage on the one hand, and emotion expression in hateful messages on the other hand. The results of experiments with features that model different combinations of these phenomena support our hypothesis that stylometric and emotion-based features are robust indicators of hate speech. Their contribution remains persistent with respect to domain and language variation. We show that the combination of features that model the targeted phenomena outperforms words and character n-gram features under cross-domain conditions, and provides a significant boost to deep learning models, which currently obtain the best results, when combined with them in an ensemble.
