Annotating speaker stance in discourse: the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC)

The BBC is a collection of texts from blog sources. The corpus texts are thematically related to the 2016 UK referendum concerning whether the UK should remain members of the European Union or not. The texts were extracted from the Internet from June to August 2015. With the Gavagai API (https://developer.gavagai.se), the texts were detected using seed words, such as Brexit, EU referendum, pro-Europe, europhiles, eurosceptics, United States of Europe, David Cameron, or Downing Street. The retrie

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The BBC is a collection of texts from blog sources. The corpus texts are thematically related to the 2016 UK referendum concerning whether the UK should remain members of the European Union or not. The texts were extracted from the Internet from June to August 2015. With the Gavagai API (https://developer.gavagai.se), the texts were detected using seed words, such as Brexit, EU referendum, pro-Europe, europhiles, eurosceptics, United States of Europe, David Cameron, or Downing Street. The retrieved URLs were filtered so that only entries described as blogs in English were selected. Each downloaded document was split into sentential utterances, from which 2,200 utterances were randomly selected as the analysis data set. The final size of the corpus is 1,682 utterances, 35,492 words (169,762 characters without spaces). Each utterance contains from 3 to 40 words with a mean length of 21 words.


For the data annotation process the Active Learning and Visual Analytics (ALVA) system (https://doi.org/10.1145/3132169 and https://doi.org/10.2312/eurp.20161139) was used. Two annotators, one who is a professional translator with a Licentiate degree in English Linguistics and the other one with a PhD in Computational Linguistics, carried out the annotations independently of one another.


The data set can be downloaded in two different formats: a standard Microsoft Excel format and a raw data format (ZIP archive) which can be useful for analytical and machine learning purposes, for example, with the Python library scikit-learn. The Excel file includes one additional variable (utterance word length). The ZIP archive contains a set of directories (e.g., "contrariety" and "prediction") corresponding to the stance categories. Inside of each such directory, there are two nested directories corresponding to annotations which assign or not assign the respective category to utterances (e.g., inside the top-level category "prediction" there are two directories, "prediction" with utterances which were labeled with this category, and "no" with the rest of the utterances). Inside of the nested directories, there are textual files containing individual utterances.


When using data from this study, the primary researcher wishes citation also to be made to the publication: Vasiliki Simaki, Carita Paradis, Maria Skeppstedt, Magnus Sahlgren, Kostiantyn Kucher, and Andreas Kerren. Annotating speaker stance in discourse: the Brexit Blog Corpus. In Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2017. De Gruyter, published electronically before print. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2016-0060 Show less..