A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and Ukraine in Slovene News Media
Jaya Caporusso, Damar Hoogland, Mojca Brglez, Boshko Koloski, Matthew Purver, Senja Pollak
Abstract
Dehumanisation involves the perception and/or treatment of a social group’s members as less than human. This phenomenon is rarely addressed with computational linguistic techniques. We adapt a recently proposed approach for English, making it easier to transfer to other languages and to evaluate, introducing a new sentiment resource, the use of zero-shot cross-lingual valence and arousal detection, and a new method for statistical significance testing. We then apply it to study attitudes to migration expressed in Slovene newspapers, to examine changes in the Slovene discourse on migration between the 2015-16 migration crisis following the war in Syria and the 2022-23 period following the war in Ukraine. We find that while this discourse became more negative and more intense over time, it is less dehumanising when specifically addressing Ukrainian migrants compared to others.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{caporusso-etal-2024-computational,
title = "A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and {U}kraine in {S}lovene News Media",
author = "Caporusso, Jaya and
Hoogland, Damar and
Brglez, Mojca and
Koloski, Boshko and
Purver, Matthew and
Pollak, Senja",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.18/",
pages = "199--210"
}