Modelling Political Aggression on Social Media Platforms

Akash Rawat, Nazia Nafis, Dnyaneshwar Bhadane, Diptesh Kanojia, Rudra Murthy


Abstract
Recent years have seen a proliferation of aggressive social media posts, often wreaking even real-world consequences for victims. Aggressive behaviour on social media is especially evident during important sociopolitical events such as elections, communal incidents, and public protests. In this paper, we introduce a dataset in English to model political aggression. The dataset comprises public tweets collated across the time-frames of two of the most recent Indian general elections. We manually annotate this data for the task of aggression detection and analyze this data for aggressive behaviour. To benchmark the efficacy of our dataset, we perform experiments by fine-tuning pre-trained language models and comparing the results with models trained on an existing but general domain dataset. Our models consistently outperform the models trained on existing data. Our best model achieves a macro F1-score of 66.66 on our dataset. We also train models on a combined version of both datasets, achieving best macro F1-score of 92.77, on our dataset. Additionally, we create subsets of code-mixed and non-code-mixed data from the combined dataset to observe variations in results due to the Hindi-English code-mixing phenomenon. We publicly release the anonymized data, code, and models for further research.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
497–510
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.43
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.43
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Akash Rawat, Nazia Nafis, Dnyaneshwar Bhadane, Diptesh Kanojia, and Rudra Murthy. 2023. Modelling Political Aggression on Social Media Platforms. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 497–510, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modelling Political Aggression on Social Media Platforms (Rawat et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.43.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.43.mp4