Fine-grained Classification of Political Bias in German News: A Data Set and Initial Experiments

Dmitrii Aksenov, Peter Bourgonje, Karolina Zaczynska, Malte Ostendorff, Julian Moreno-Schneider, Georg Rehm


Abstract
We present a data set consisting of German news articles labeled for political bias on a five-point scale in a semi-supervised way. While earlier work on hyperpartisan news detection uses binary classification (i.e., hyperpartisan or not) and English data, we argue for a more fine-grained classification, covering the full political spectrum (i.e., far-left, left, centre, right, far-right) and for extending research to German data. Understanding political bias helps in accurately detecting hate speech and online abuse. We experiment with different classification methods for political bias detection. Their comparatively low performance (a macro-F1 of 43 for our best setup, compared to a macro-F1 of 79 for the binary classification task) underlines the need for more (balanced) data annotated in a fine-grained way.
Anthology ID:
2021.woah-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Douwe Kiela, Mathias Lambert, Bertie Vidgen, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Zeerak Waseem
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
121–131
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.woah-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.woah-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dmitrii Aksenov, Peter Bourgonje, Karolina Zaczynska, Malte Ostendorff, Julian Moreno-Schneider, and Georg Rehm. 2021. Fine-grained Classification of Political Bias in German News: A Data Set and Initial Experiments. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021), pages 121–131, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fine-grained Classification of Political Bias in German News: A Data Set and Initial Experiments (Aksenov et al., WOAH 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.woah-1.13.pdf
Code
 axenov/politik-news