The paper introduces a new annotated Spanish and Catalan data set for Sentiment Analysis about the Catalan separatism and the related debate held in social media at the end of 2015. It focuses on the collection of data, where we dealt with the exploitation in the debate of two languages, i.e. Spanish and Catalan, and on the design of the annotation scheme, previously applied in the development of other corpora about political debates, which extends a polarity label set by making available tags for irony and semantic oriented labels. The annotation process is presented and the detected disagreement discussed.
[EN] Stance Detection is the task of automatically determining whether the author of a text is in favor, against, or neutral towards a given target. In this paper we investigate the portability of tools performing this task across different languages, by analyzing the results achieved by a Stance Detection system (i.e. MultiTACOS) trained and tested in a multilingual setting. First of all, a set of resources on topics related to politics for English, French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan is provided which includes: novel corpora collected for the purpose of this study, and benchmark corpora exploited in Stance Detection tasks and evaluation exercises known in literature. We focus in particular on the novel corpora by describing their development and by comparing them with the benchmarks. Second, MultiTACOS is applied with different sets of features especially designed for Stance Detection, with a specific focus to exploring and combining both features based on the textual content of the tweet (e.g., style and affective load) and features based on contextual information that do not emerge directly from the text. Finally, for better highlighting the contribution of the features that most positively affect system performance in the multilingual setting, a features analysis is provided, together with a qualitative analysis of the misclassified tweets for each of the observed languages, devoted to reflect on the open challenges. ; Cristina Bosco and Viviana Patti are partially supported by Progetto di Ateneo/CSP 2016 (Immigrants, Hate and Prejudice in Social Media, S1618_L2_BOSC_01). The work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded bythe Spanish MICINN under the research project MISMIS-FAKEnHATE on MISinformation and MIScommunication in social media: FAKE news and HATE speech (PGC2018096212-B-C31). ; Lai, M.; Cignarella, AT.; Hernandez-Farias, DI.; Bosco, C.; Patti, V.; Rosso, P. (2020). Multilingual Stance Detection in Social Media Political Debates. Computer Speech & Language. 63:1-27. ...
