论文标题
在情人眼中：分析社交媒体对Covid-19的中性和有争议术语的使用
In the Eyes of the Beholder: Analyzing Social Media Use of Neutral and Controversial Terms for COVID-19
论文作者
论文摘要
在Covid-19大流行期间，“中国病毒”成为冠状病毒的一个有争议的术语。在某些人看来，这似乎是一个涉及病毒物理起源的中性术语。但是，对于许多其他人来说，这个术语实际上是将种族依附于病毒。尽管这两个论点似乎都是合理的，但对该术语的现实世界使用的定量分析却揭示了争议背后的问题。在本文中，我们试图填补这一空白。为了模拟具有有争议的术语的推文的实质性差异，我们采用主题建模和基于LIWC的情感分析。为了测试“中国病毒”和“ covid-19”是否可以互换，我们将其作为分类任务，掩盖这些术语，并使用最新的变压器模型对其进行分类。我们的实验始终表明，“中国病毒”一词与“ Covid-19”相比与不同的实质主题和情感有关，并且两个术语可以通过查看其上下文很容易区分。
During the COVID-19 pandemic, "Chinese Virus" emerged as a controversial term for coronavirus. To some, it may seem like a neutral term referring to the physical origin of the virus. To many others, however, the term is in fact attaching ethnicity to the virus. While both arguments appear reasonable, quantitative analysis of the term's real-world usage is lacking to shed light on the issues behind the controversy. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap. To model the substantive difference of tweets with controversial terms and those with non-controversial terms, we apply topic modeling and LIWC-based sentiment analysis. To test whether "Chinese Virus" and "COVID-19" are interchangeable, we formulate it as a classification task, mask out these terms, and classify them using the state-of-the-art transformer models. Our experiments consistently show that the term "Chinese Virus" is associated with different substantive topics and sentiment compared with "COVID-19" and that the two terms are easily distinguishable by looking at their context.
