Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with MPs' Tweets: Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using MultiParTweet
This provides a resource for political scientists and computational linguists to compare online and parliamentary communication, though it is incremental as it extends existing corpora with automated tools.
The researchers tackled the problem of analyzing politicians' social media discourse by creating MultiParTweet, a multilingual tweet corpus linked to a German parliamentary corpus, and automatically annotating it with emotion, sentiment, and topic labels using multiple models, including a vision-language model. The result includes 39,546 tweets with validated annotations, showing that the models are mutually predictable and that multimodal annotations align better with human interpretation.
Social media serves as a critical medium in modern politics because it both reflects politicians' ideologies and facilitates communication with younger generations. We present MultiParTweet, a multilingual tweet corpus from X that connects politicians' social media discourse with German political corpus GerParCor, thereby enabling comparative analyses between online communication and parliamentary debates. MultiParTweet contains 39 546 tweets, including 19 056 media items. Furthermore, we enriched the annotation with nine text-based models and one vision-language model (VLM) to annotate MultiParTweet with emotion, sentiment, and topic annotations. Moreover, the automated annotations are evaluated against a manually annotated subset. MultiParTweet can be reconstructed using our tool, TTLABTweetCrawler, which provides a framework for collecting data from X. To demonstrate a methodological demonstration, we examine whether the models can predict each other using the outputs of the remaining models. In summary, we provide MultiParTweet, a resource integrating automatic text and media-based annotations validated with human annotations, and TTLABTweetCrawler, a general-purpose X data collection tool. Our analysis shows that the models are mutually predictable. In addition, VLM-based annotation were preferred by human annotators, suggesting that multimodal representations align more with human interpretation.