Twitter data has become established as a valuable source of data for various application scenarios in the past years. For many such applications, it is necessary to know where Twitter posts (tweets) were sent from or what location they refer to. Rese
archers have frequently used exact coordinates provided in a small percentage of tweets, but Twitter removed the option to share these coordinates in mid-2019. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that a large share of the provided coordinates did not correspond to GPS coordinates of the user even before that. In this paper, we explain the situation and the 2019 policy change and shed light on the various options of still obtaining location information from tweets. We provide usage statistics including changes over time, and analyze what the removal of exact coordinates means for various common research tasks performed with Twitter data. Finally, we make suggestions for future research requiring geolocated tweets.
Stance detection (SD) entails classifying the sentiment of a text towards a given target, and is a relevant sub-task for opinion mining and social media analysis. Recent works have explored knowledge infusion supplementing the linguistic competence a
nd latent knowledge of large pre-trained language models with structured knowledge graphs (KGs), yet few works have applied such methods to the SD task. In this work, we first perform stance-relevant knowledge probing on Transformers-based pre-trained models in a zero-shot setting, showing these models' latent real-world knowledge about SD targets and their sensitivity to context. We then train and evaluate new knowledge-enriched stance detection models on two Twitter stance datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both.
This paper describes the annotation process of an offensive language data set for Romanian on social media. To facilitate comparable multi-lingual research on offensive language, the annotation guidelines follow some of the recent annotation efforts
for other languages. The final corpus contains 5000 micro-blogging posts annotated by a large number of volunteer annotators. The inter-annotator agreement and the initial automatic discrimination results we present are in line with earlier annotation efforts.
In this paper, we introduce a new English Twitter-based dataset for cyberbullying detection and online abuse. Comprising 62,587 tweets, this dataset was sourced from Twitter using specific query terms designed to retrieve tweets with high probabiliti
es of various forms of bullying and offensive content, including insult, trolling, profanity, sarcasm, threat, porn and exclusion. We recruited a pool of 17 annotators to perform fine-grained annotation on the dataset with each tweet annotated by three annotators. All our annotators are high school educated and frequent users of social media. Inter-rater agreement for the dataset as measured by Krippendorff's Alpha is 0.67. Analysis performed on the dataset confirmed common cyberbullying themes reported by other studies and revealed interesting relationships between the classes. The dataset was used to train a number of transformer-based deep learning models returning impressive results.
Computational social science studies often contextualize content analysis within standard demographics. Since demographics are unavailable on many social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), numerous studies have inferred demographics automatically. Despi
te many studies presenting proof-of-concept inference of race and ethnicity, training of practical systems remains elusive since there are few annotated datasets. Existing datasets are small, inaccurate, or fail to cover the four most common racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We present a method to identify self-reports of race and ethnicity from Twitter profile descriptions. Despite the noise of automated supervision, our self-report datasets enable improvements in classification performance on gold standard self-report survey data. The result is a reproducible method for creating large-scale training resources for race and ethnicity.
This paper describes our team's submission for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2021 shared task. We participated in three subtasks: Classifying adverse drug effect, COVID-19 self-report, and COVID-19 symptoms. Our system is based on BERT m
odel pre-trained on the domain-specific text. In addition, we perform data cleaning and augmentation, as well as hyperparameter optimization and model ensemble to further boost the BERT performance. We achieved the first rank in both classifying adverse drug effects and COVID-19 self-report tasks.
In this paper, we describe our system entry for Shared Task 8 at SMM4H-2021, which is on automatic classification of self-reported breast cancer posts on Twitter. In our system, we use a transformer-based language model fine-tuning approach to automa
tically identify tweets in the self-reports category. Furthermore, we involve a Gradient-based Adversarial fine-tuning to improve the overall model's robustness. Our system achieved an F1-score of 0.8625 on the Development set and 0.8501 on the Test set in Shared Task-8 of SMM4H-2021.
In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pan
demic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweetsand conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing. Preliminary analysis shows that ArCOV-19 captures rising discussions associated with the first reported cases of the disease as they appeared in the Arab world.In addition to the source tweets and the propagation networks, we also release the search queries and the language-independent crawler used to collect the tweets to encourage the curation of similar datasets.
Online misogyny has become an increasing worry for Arab women who experience gender-based online abuse on a daily basis. Misogyny automatic detection systems can assist in the prohibition of anti-women Arabic toxic content. Developing such systems is
hindered by the lack of the Arabic misogyny benchmark datasets. In this paper, we introduce an Arabic Levantine Twitter dataset for Misogynistic language (LeT-Mi) to be the first benchmark dataset for Arabic misogyny. We further provide a detailed review of the dataset creation and annotation phases. The consistency of the annotations for the proposed dataset was emphasized through inter-rater agreement evaluation measures. Moreover, Let-Mi was used as an evaluation dataset through binary/multi-/target classification tasks conducted by several state-of-the-art machine learning systems along with Multi-Task Learning (MTL) configuration. The obtained results indicated that the performances achieved by the used systems are consistent with state-of-the-art results for languages other than Arabic, while employing MTL improved the performance of the misogyny/target classification tasks.
The 2020 US Elections have been, more than ever before, characterized by social media campaigns and mutual accusations. We investigate in this paper if this manifests also in online communication of the supporters of the candidates Biden and Trump, b
y uttering hateful and offensive communication. We formulate an annotation task, in which we join the tasks of hateful/offensive speech detection and stance detection, and annotate 3000 Tweets from the campaign period, if they express a particular stance towards a candidate. Next to the established classes of favorable and against, we add mixed and neutral stances and also annotate if a candidate is mentioned with- out an opinion expression. Further, we an- notate if the tweet is written in an offensive style. This enables us to analyze if supporters of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party communicate differently than supporters of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. A BERT baseline classifier shows that the detection if somebody is a supporter of a candidate can be performed with high quality (.89 F1 for Trump and .91 F1 for Biden), while the detection that somebody expresses to be against a candidate is more challenging (.79 F1 and .64 F1, respectively). The automatic detection of hate/offensive speech remains challenging (with .53 F1). Our corpus is publicly available and constitutes a novel resource for computational modelling of offensive language under consideration of stances.
