What to Annotate: Retrieving Lexical Markers of Conspiracy Discourse from an Italian-English Corpus of Telegram Data

Costanza Marini, Elisabetta Jezek


Abstract
In this age of social media, Conspiracy Theories (CTs) have become an issue that can no longer be ignored. After providing an overview of CT literature and corpus studies, we describe the creation of a 40,000-token English-Italian bilingual corpus of conspiracy-oriented Telegram comments – the Complotto corpus – and the linguistic analysis we performed using the Sketch Engine online platform (Kilgarriff et al., 2010) on our annotated data to identify statistically relevant linguistic markers of CT discourse. Thanks to the platform’s keywords and key terms extraction functions, we were able to assess the statistical significance of the following lexical and semantic phenomena, both cross-linguistically and cross-CT, namely: (1) evidentiality and epistemic modality markers; (2) debunking vocabulary referring to another version of the truth lying behind the official one; (3) the conceptual metaphor INSTITUTIONS ARE ABUSERS. All these features qualify as markers of CT discourse and have the potential to be effectively used for future semantic annotation tasks to develop automatic systems for CT identification.
Anthology ID:
2024.isa-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Harry Bunt, Nancy Ide, Kiyong Lee, Volha Petukhova, James Pustejovsky, Laurent Romary
Venues:
ISA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
47–52
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.isa-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Costanza Marini and Elisabetta Jezek. 2024. What to Annotate: Retrieving Lexical Markers of Conspiracy Discourse from an Italian-English Corpus of Telegram Data. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 47–52, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
What to Annotate: Retrieving Lexical Markers of Conspiracy Discourse from an Italian-English Corpus of Telegram Data (Marini & Jezek, ISA-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.isa-1.6.pdf