Annotating Perspectives on Vaccination

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4964–4973 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 4964 Annotating Perspectives on Vaccination Roser Morante, Chantal van Son, Isa Maks, Piek Vossen CLTL Lab, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands {r.morantevallejo, c.m.van.son, isa.maks, piek.vossen}@vu.nl Abstract In this paper we present the Vaccination Corpus, a corpus of texts related to the online vaccination debate that has been annotated with three layers of information about perspectives: attribution, claims and opinions. Additionally, events related to the vaccination debate are also annotated. The corpus contains 294 documents from the Internet which reflect different views on vaccinations. It has been compiled to study the language of online debates, with the final goal of experimenting with methodologies to extract and contrast perspectives within the vaccination debate. Keywords: perspectives, attribution, opinions, claims, vaccination debate. 1. Introduction Debates can be very lively and the language used for de- bating is often complex and rich. There are, however, not many corpora of real life debates and, if so, the available debates are somehow orchestrated as e.g. parliamentary debates.1 Nevertheless, the Internet contains a broad va- riety of texts expressing opinions, beliefs, and statements on many different topics. Partly, we can find these posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Reddit, but very often they are dispersed all over the web in individual blogs or smaller platforms. The dispersed nature makes it very difficult to grasp the language of online debates and to develop technology that could get to grips with social developments. In this paper we present the Vaccination Corpus,2 a cor- pus of texts related to the online vaccination debate that has been annotated with information about perspectives. The corpus contains documents from the Internet (news, blogs, editorial, governmental reports, science articles), which re- flect different views on vaccination. It has been compiled to study the language of online debates, with the final goal of experimenting with methodologies to extract and contrast perspectives within the vaccination debate. Though vaccines have been proven to be efficient in pre- venting illnesses, doubts about the reliability of vaccines can easily grow among the population under the influence of negative information about vaccines or unbalanced re- ports of vaccine risk (Betsch and Sachse, 2012). Since the Internet is a source of health related information for an in- creasing number of individuals, the spread of information about vaccines and related attitudes can have a high impact on the decisions that the population takes and, specifically, on the decisions of parents as to vaccinate their children or not. The information spread through the internet is influ- encing the attitude towards vaccination, causing the vacci- nation rates to drop and outbreaks to appear. For example, an outbreak began at Anaheim, California’s Disneyland in 1https://www.clarin.eu/resource-families/ parliamentary-corpora. 2The annotations of the Vaccination Corpus are available at https://github.com/cltl/VaccinationCorpus. early 2015. At its peak, the outbreak caused 113 children in multiple states to …

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