To make someone do something: mining alert-style directives in Bulgarian social media for low-resource language modelling

Ruslana Margova, Stanislav Penkov


Abstract
The work demonstrates how meaningful rhetorical signals can be isolated from a social media dataset even without pre-labelled data or predefined lexicons. By combining unsupervised mining with linguistic theory and interpretable machine learning, the research offers a scalable approach to understanding how language can shape political perception and behaviour in digital spaces.The study focuses on Bulgarian, a morphologically rich, relatively low-resource language, and produces reusable resources—alert constructions, post-level features, and trained classifiers—that are explicitly designed to support low-resource language modelling, including the training and evaluation of neural language models and LLMs for tasks such as content moderation and propaganda-alert detection. The finding that rhetorical salience, not just topical content, drives engagement has implications beyond Bulgarian: it suggests that how something is said may matter as much as what is said in determining a message’s viral potential and persuasive impact.
Anthology ID:
2026.loreslm-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Alistair Plum, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venue:
LoResLM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
62–72
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruslana Margova and Stanislav Penkov. 2026. To make someone do something: mining alert-style directives in Bulgarian social media for low-resource language modelling. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026), pages 62–72, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
To make someone do something: mining alert-style directives in Bulgarian social media for low-resource language modelling (Margova & Penkov, LoResLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.6.pdf