Polarization and its Life on Social Media: A Case Study on Sabarimala and Demonetisation

Ashutosh Ranjan, Dipti Sharma, Radhika Krishnan


Abstract
This paper is an attempt to study polarisation on social media data. We focus on two hugely controversial and talked about events in the Indian diaspora, namely 1) the Sabarimala Temple (located in Kerala, India) incident which became a nationwide controversy when two women under the age of 50 secretly entered the temple breaking a long standing temple rule that disallowed women of menstruating age (10-50) to enter the temple and 2) the Indian government’s move to demonetise all existing 500 and 1000 denomination banknotes, comprising of 86% of the currency in circulation, in November 2016. We gather tweets around these two events in various time periods, preprocess and annotate them with their sentiment polarity and emotional category, and analyse trends to help us understand changing polarity over time around controversial events. The tweets collected are in English, Hindi and code-mixed Hindi-English. Apart from the analysis on the annotated data, we also present the twitter data comprising a total of around 1.5 million tweets.
Anthology ID:
2020.icon-main.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India
Editors:
Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Dipti Misra Sharma, Rajeev Sangal
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
393–399
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.icon-main.54
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashutosh Ranjan, Dipti Sharma, and Radhika Krishnan. 2020. Polarization and its Life on Social Media: A Case Study on Sabarimala and Demonetisation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 393–399, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Polarization and its Life on Social Media: A Case Study on Sabarimala and Demonetisation (Ranjan et al., ICON 2020)
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