Seeds of Discourse: A Multilingual Corpus of Direct Quotations from African Media on Agricultural Biotechnologies
Patricia Chiril, Trevor Spreadbury, Joeva Sean Rock, Brian Dowd-Uribe, David Uminsky
Abstract
Direct quotations play a crucial role in journalism by substantiating claims and enhancing persuasive communication. This makes news articles a rich resource for opinion mining, providing valuable insights into the topics they cover. This paper presents the first multilingual corpora (English and French) featuring both manually annotated (1,657) and automatically extracted (102,483) direct quotations related to agricultural biotechnologies from a curated list of Africa-based news sources. In addition, we provide 665 instances annotated for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, enabling a fine-grained examination of sentiment toward key aspects of agricultural biotechnologies. These corpora are freely available to the research community for future work on media discourse surrounding agricultural biotechnologies.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chiril-etal-2025-seeds,
title = "Seeds of Discourse: A Multilingual Corpus of Direct Quotations from {A}frican Media on Agricultural Biotechnologies",
author = "Chiril, Patricia and
Spreadbury, Trevor and
Rock, Joeva Sean and
Dowd-Uribe, Brian and
Uminsky, David",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.473/",
pages = "8494--8500",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7"
}