Today, news media organizations regularly engage with readers by enabling them to comment on news articles. This creates the need for comment moderation and removal of disallowed comments -- a time-consuming task often performed by human moderators.
In this paper we approach the problem of automatic news comment moderation as classification of comments into blocked and not blocked categories. We construct a novel dataset of annotated English comments, experiment with cross-lingual transfer of comment labels and evaluate several machine learning models on datasets of Croatian and Estonian news comments. Team name: SuperAdmin; Challenge: Detection of blocked comments; Tools/models: CroSloEn BERT, FinEst BERT, 24Sata comment dataset, Ekspress comment dataset.
We conduct automatic sentiment and viewpoint analysis of the newly created Slovenian news corpus containing articles related to the topic of LGBTIQ+ by employing the state-of-the-art news sentiment classifier and a system for semantic change detectio
n. The focus is on the differences in reporting between quality news media with long tradition and news media with financial and political connections to SDS, a Slovene right-wing political party. The results suggest that political affiliation of the media can affect the sentiment distribution of articles and the framing of specific LGBTIQ+ specific topics, such as same-sex marriage.
