Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining

Hao Lin, Pradeep Nalluri, Lantian Li, Yifan Sun, Yongjun Zhang


Abstract
COVID-19 has disproportionately threatened minority communities in the U.S, not only in health but also in societal impact. However, social scientists and policymakers lack critical data to capture the dynamics of the anti-Asian hate trend and to evaluate its scale and scope. We introduce new datasets from Twitter related to anti-Asian hate sentiment before and during the pandemic. Relying on Twitter’s academic API, we retrieve hateful and counter-hate tweets from the Twitter Historical Database. To build contextual understanding and collect related racial cues, we also collect instances of heated arguments, often political, but not necessarily hateful, discussing Chinese issues. We then use the state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers to discern whether these tweets express hatred. These datasets can be used to study hate speech, general anti-Asian or Chinese sentiment, and hate linguistics by social scientists as well as to evaluate and build hate speech or sentiment analysis classifiers by computational scholars.
Anthology ID:
2022.wassa-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sawsan Alqahtani, João Sedoc, Roman Klinger, Alexandra Balahur
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16–24
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.wassa-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hao Lin, Pradeep Nalluri, Lantian Li, Yifan Sun, and Yongjun Zhang. 2022. Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, pages 16–24, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining (Lin et al., WASSA 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.wassa-1.2.mp4