CoNTACT: A Dutch COVID-19 Adapted BERT for Vaccine Hesitancy and Argumentation Detection
Jens Lemmens, Jens Van Nooten, Tim Kreutz, Walter Daelemans
Abstract
We present CoNTACT: a Dutch language model adapted to the domain of COVID-19 tweets. The model was developed by continuing the pre-training phase of RobBERT (Delobelle et al., 2020) by using 2.8M Dutch COVID-19 related tweets posted in 2021. In order to test the performance of the model and compare it to RobBERT, the two models were tested on two tasks: (1) binary vaccine hesitancy detection and (2) detection of arguments for vaccine hesitancy. For both tasks, not only Twitter but also Facebook data was used to show cross-genre performance. In our experiments, CoNTACT showed statistically significant gains over RobBERT in all experiments for task 1. For task 2, we observed substantial improvements in virtually all classes in all experiments. An error analysis indicated that the domain adaptation yielded better representations of domain-specific terminology, causing CoNTACT to make more accurate classification decisions. For task 2, we observed substantial improvements in virtually all classes in all experiments. An error analysis indicated that the domain adaptation yielded better representations of domain-specific terminology, causing CoNTACT to make more accurate classification decisions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lemmens-etal-2022-contact,
title = "{C}o{NTACT}: A {D}utch {COVID}-19 Adapted {BERT} for Vaccine Hesitancy and Argumentation Detection",
author = "Lemmens, Jens and
Van Nooten, Jens and
Kreutz, Tim and
Daelemans, Walter",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.595/",
pages = "6837--6845"
}