Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts
This addresses the issue of racial bias in sports commentary for researchers and social scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on prior studies with a larger dataset.
The researchers tackled the problem of commentator bias in sports broadcasts by assembling FOOTBALL, a large corpus of 1,455 American football transcripts with 250K player mentions, and performed a computational analysis that supported prior social science findings on racial bias.
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince commentator bias in sports broadcasts. To examine this phenomenon, we assemble FOOTBALL, which contains 1,455 broadcast transcripts from American football games across six decades that are automatically annotated with 250K player mentions and linked with racial metadata. We identify major confounding factors for researchers examining racial bias in FOOTBALL, and perform a computational analysis that supports conclusions from prior social science studies.