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.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
199–210
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaya Caporusso, Damar Hoogland, Mojca Brglez, Boshko Koloski, Matthew Purver, and Senja Pollak. 2024. A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and Ukraine in Slovene News Media. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 199–210, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and Ukraine in Slovene News Media (Caporusso et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.18.pdf