Multi-Dimensional Insights: Annotated Dataset of Stance, Sentiment, and Emotion in Facebook Comments on Tunisia’s July 25 Measures

Sanaa Laabar, Wajdi Zaghouani


Abstract
On July 25, 2021, Tunisian President Kais Saied announced the suspension of parliament and dismissal of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, a move that sparked intense public debate. This study investigates Tunisian public opinion regarding these events by analyzing a corpus of 7,535 Facebook comments collected from the official Tunisian presidency page, specifically the post announcing the July 25 measures. A team of three annotators labeled a subset of 5,000 comments, categorizing each comment’s political stance (supportive, opposing, or neutral), sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral), emotions, presence of hate speech, aggressive tone, and racism. The inter-annotator agreement, measured by Cohen’s kappa, was 0.61, indicating substantial consensus. The analysis reveals that a majority of commenters supported President Saied’s actions, outnumbering those who opposed or took a neutral stance. Moreover, the overall sentiment expressed in the comments was predominantly positive. This study provides valuable insights into the complex landscape of public opinion in Tunisia during a crucial moment in the country’s ongoing political transformation, highlighting the role of social media as a platform for political discourse and engagement.
Anthology ID:
2024.politicalnlp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Haithem Afli, Houda Bouamor, Cristina Blasi Casagran, Sahar Ghannay
Venues:
PoliticalNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
22–32
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.politicalnlp-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanaa Laabar and Wajdi Zaghouani. 2024. Multi-Dimensional Insights: Annotated Dataset of Stance, Sentiment, and Emotion in Facebook Comments on Tunisia’s July 25 Measures. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 22–32, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Dimensional Insights: Annotated Dataset of Stance, Sentiment, and Emotion in Facebook Comments on Tunisia’s July 25 Measures (Laabar & Zaghouani, PoliticalNLP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.politicalnlp-1.3.pdf