GATE team hosts its first ATRIUM TNA research visit: Using NLP to understand trends in political and social debate

In December 2024, we hosted research visitor Tasos Galanopoulos as part of  the ATRIUM project (Advancing fronTier Research In the arts and hUManities) TransNational Access scheme. ATRIUM's aim is to bridge 4 leading research infrastructures in: arts and humanities (DARIAH), archaeology (ARIADNE), language technology (CLARIN), and open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (OPERAS). The Transnational Access (TNA) scheme offers fully funded placements for researchers across Europe. This initiative is designed to support Arts and Humanities researchers by providing access to expert knowledge, mentorship, and tools from leading Data Management organisations. Successful applicants have the opportunity to visit one of 14 different host organisations across Europe in order to conduct their research, benefiting from direct contact, knowledge sharing and network building. 

Tasos describes his visit below...

How can NLP tools and large language models be used to understand trends in political and social debate around major issues of the day? 

 What is the relationship between 'distant reading' and the layered understanding that these tools offer for large volumes of data, and 'close reading', understanding aspects of these topical issues?  

What role can these modern tools play in the humanities and in everyday journalistic practice?  

Questions such as these, on the occasion of a project on "Analysis of textual data from newspapers on the agreement of Greece's accession to the European Economic Community EEC (1961)", in the context of my postgraduate studies in Digital Humanities at the Open University of Greece, brought me to the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield at the end of November (23/11/2024 - 7/12/2024), to collaborate with members of the GATE team.

Despite the short period of the stay, the impressions were the best: the patience and goodwill of all the team - with Dr Maynard at the forefront - helped me to "navigate" the tools offered by the GATE Cloud and the European Language Grid, to understand a bit better the processes required, and the wider field, to learn a bit more about its "alphabet" and requirements. At the same time, through the regular meetings of the team I was able to get a "glimpse" of the modern, specialised, and valuable research being carried out at the university.  

In relation to the actual subject of the research, the findings from the processing with tools such as NamedEntity Recognition, N-gram detection and their visualization with wordclouds, Topic Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Multidimensional analysis with LIWC-22, Persuasion techniques were very interesting, giving answers and insights to our questions that had to do with the attempt to develop a methodology to identify, document and frame named entities in the context of the investigation of public discourse, Press with different political orientation and political rhetoric in relation to critical events in political life, with reference to the economic and social environment inside and outside the country. Also "identifying" and categorising arguments for and against, and 'bias' for/against in the Press of that time and at a subsequent level , enabled us to explore ways to link entities to key concepts in argumentation.

 Overall, my impressions were therefore the best from this constructive visit, a visit that on a personal level gave me inspiration and opened new horizons, but also created new contacts with remarkable people.

Monitoring human rights violations against journalists

In February 2024, the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) hosted a research secondment focusing on discussiong how to develop monitoring of human rights violations directed at journalists. The secondment saw researchers from CFOM (Dr Diana Maynard from the GATE team, and Prof. Jackie Harrison and Dr. Gemma Horton from the School of Journalism, Media and Communication) come together with UNESCO and Free Press Unlimited to discuss the threats that journalists face and how these can be monitored in line with UN SDG16.10.1.

Following the research secondment, Dr Maynard has been awarded £35,000 to work on a collaborative project with UNESCO and Free Press Unlimited, entitled: “Influencing policy work on human rights violations against journalists”

The project focuses on monitoring and analysing non-lethal attacks on journalists in alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 16.10.1, and aims to better understand 1) the scope and context of these violations, 2) how these can be systematically and reliably monitored, resulting in the creation of 3) a database; all of which will inform future policy on monitoring safety of journalists. 

The Sheffield and FPU teams are developing a risk barometer that employs machine learning to identify patterns and indicators, helping to understand the contextual factors that predict lethal and non-lethal violence against journalists. It emphasises the crucial role of Press Freedom and Advocacy organisations in reducing these risks, highlighting the need for a proactive, evidence-based approach to forecasting threats. This strategy aims to enable earlier interventions and stronger protections for journalists globally by identifying contextual risk factors that elevate threats, such as online harassment, legal intimidation, democratic backsliding, civil conflict, and physical violence. In the first stage, it aims to accurately detect patterns and hotspots using global event data from various resources, such as GDELT, which tracks real-time global events every 15 minutes, and will utilize additional resources to gain insights into emerging risks as they arise. Simultaneously, we are connecting contextual data to data on attacks towards journalists, to gain a deeper understanding of the causes of not only lethal but also non-lethal violence towards journalists. 

Preliminary findings have identified some basic patterns: online harassment often serves as a precursor to physical intimidation. Additionally, regions such as Gaza, Ukraine, and Mexico have been identified as high-risk areas due to factors including conflict, organised crime, and authoritarian policies. Furthermore, we find that political polarisation seems strongly correlated with the level of legal threats that journalists face. These important relationships will be further investigated by the collaborative team in the upcoming months.