Abstract
We present the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus (SOCC ), a collection of opinion articles and the comments posted in response to the articles. The articles include all the opinion pieces published in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in the 5-year period between 2012 and 2016, a total of 10,339 articles and 663,173 comments. SOCC is part of a project that investigates the linguistic characteristics of online comments. The corpus can be used to study a host of pragmatic phenomena. Among other aspects, researchers can explore: the connections between articles and comments; the connections of comments to each other; the types of topics discussed in comments; the nice (constructive) or mean (toxic) ways in which commenters respond to each other; how language is used to convey very specific types of evaluation; and how negation affects the interpretation of evaluative meaning in discourse. Our current focus is the study of constructiveness and evaluation in the comments. To that end, we have annotated a subset of the large corpus (1043 comments) with four layers of annotations: constructiveness, toxicity, negation and Appraisal (Martin and White, The language of evaluation, Palgrave, New York, 2005). This paper details our corpus, the data collection process, the characteristics of the corpus and describes the annotations. While our focus is comments posted in response to opinion news articles, the phenomena in this corpus are likely to be present in many commenting platforms: other news comments, comments and replies in fora such as Reddit, feedback on blogs, or YouTube comments.
Highlights
Online commenting allows for direct communication among people and organizations from diverse socioeconomic classes and backgrounds on important issues
In addition to the raw corpus, we present annotations for four different phenomena: constructiveness, toxicity, negation and its scope, and Appraisal (Martin and White 2005), all defined later in the paper
Agreement and Results Percentage agreement for the constructiveness question on a random sample of 100 annotations was 87.88%, and Krippendorff’s alpha on the full dataset was 0.49. These results suggest that constructiveness can be fairly reliably annotated
Summary
Online commenting allows for direct communication among people and organizations from diverse socioeconomic classes and backgrounds on important issues. Popular news articles receive thousands of comments These comments create a rich resource for linguists, as they provide examples of evaluative, abusive and argumentative language; sarcasm; dialogic structure; and occasionally well-informed constructive language. They contain information about people’s opinion or stance on important issues, policies, popular topics, and public figures. Online comments can be characterized as polylogues (Marcoccia 2004), because they involve multiple levels of dialogue across participants. These questions revolve around the types of interactions and the nature of personal reference across participants, including attacks and abuse
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