Detection of Negative Campaign in Israeli Municipal Elections

Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Sagiv Talker, Or Machlouf


Abstract
Political competitions are complex settings where candidates use campaigns to promote their chances to be elected. One choice focuses on conducting a positive campaign that highlights the candidate’s achievements, leadership skills, and future programs. The alternative is to focus on a negative campaign that emphasizes the negative aspects of the competing person and is aimed at offending opponents or the opponent’s supporters. In this proposal, we concentrate on negative campaigns in Israeli elections. This work introduces an empirical case study on automatic detection of negative campaigns, using machine learning and natural language processing approaches, applied to the Hebrew-language data from Israeli municipal elections. Our contribution is multi-fold: (1) We provide TONIC—daTaset fOr Negative polItical Campaign in Hebrew—which consists of annotated posts from Facebook related to Israeli municipal elections; (2) We introduce results of a case study, that explored several research questions. RQ1: Which classifier and representation perform best for this task? We employed several traditional classifiers which are known for their good performance in IR tasks and two pre-trained models based on BERT architecture; several standard representations were employed with traditional ML models. RQ2: Does a negative campaign always contain offensive language? Can a model, trained to detect offensive language, also detect negative campaigns? We are trying to answer this question by reporting results for the transfer learning from a dataset annotated with offensive language to our dataset.
Anthology ID:
2022.trac-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022)
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Ritesh Kumar, Atul Kr. Ojha, Marcos Zampieri, Shervin Malmasi, Daniel Kadar
Venue:
TRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
68–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.trac-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Sagiv Talker, and Or Machlouf. 2022. Detection of Negative Campaign in Israeli Municipal Elections. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022), pages 68–74, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detection of Negative Campaign in Israeli Municipal Elections (Litvak et al., TRAC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.trac-1.9.pdf
Code
 nataliavanetik1/tonic