What distinguishes conspiracy from critical narratives? A computational analysis of oppositional discourse

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Korenčić, Damir, Chulvi, Berta, Casals, Xavier Bonet, Toselli, Alejandro, Taulé, Mariona, Rosso, Paolo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Korenčić, Damir
Chulvi, Berta
Casals, Xavier Bonet
Toselli, Alejandro
Taulé, Mariona
Rosso, Paolo
author_facet Korenčić, Damir
Chulvi, Berta
Casals, Xavier Bonet
Toselli, Alejandro
Taulé, Mariona
Rosso, Paolo
contents The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a conspiracy theory and texts which are simply critical and oppose mainstream narratives. Furthermore, little attention is usually paid to the role of inter-group conflict in oppositional narratives. We contribute by proposing a novel topic-agnostic annotation scheme that differentiates between conspiracies and critical texts, and that defines span-level categories of inter-group conflict. We also contribute with the multilingual XAI-DisInfodemics corpus (English and Spanish), which contains a high-quality annotation of Telegram messages related to COVID-19 (5,000 messages per language). We also demonstrate the feasibility of an NLP-based automatization by performing a range of experiments that yield strong baseline solutions. Finally, we perform an analysis which demonstrates that the promotion of intergroup conflict and the presence of violence and anger are key aspects to distinguish between the two types of oppositional narratives, i.e., conspiracy vs. critical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_10745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What distinguishes conspiracy from critical narratives? A computational analysis of oppositional discourse
Korenčić, Damir
Chulvi, Berta
Casals, Xavier Bonet
Toselli, Alejandro
Taulé, Mariona
Rosso, Paolo
Computation and Language
I.2.7; J.4
The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a conspiracy theory and texts which are simply critical and oppose mainstream narratives. Furthermore, little attention is usually paid to the role of inter-group conflict in oppositional narratives. We contribute by proposing a novel topic-agnostic annotation scheme that differentiates between conspiracies and critical texts, and that defines span-level categories of inter-group conflict. We also contribute with the multilingual XAI-DisInfodemics corpus (English and Spanish), which contains a high-quality annotation of Telegram messages related to COVID-19 (5,000 messages per language). We also demonstrate the feasibility of an NLP-based automatization by performing a range of experiments that yield strong baseline solutions. Finally, we perform an analysis which demonstrates that the promotion of intergroup conflict and the presence of violence and anger are key aspects to distinguish between the two types of oppositional narratives, i.e., conspiracy vs. critical.
title What distinguishes conspiracy from critical narratives? A computational analysis of oppositional discourse
topic Computation and Language
I.2.7; J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10745