In this work the authors propose a novel Selectivity-Based Keyword Extraction (SBKE) method, which extracts keywords from the source text represented as a network. The node selectivity value is calculated from a weighted network as the average weight distributed on the links of a single node and is used in the procedure of keyword candidate ranking and extraction. The authors show that selectivity-based keyword extraction slightly outperforms an extraction based on the standard centrality measures: in/out-degree, betweenness and closeness. Therefore, they include selectivity and its modification – generalized selectivity as node centrality measures in the SBKE method. Selectivity-based extraction does not require linguistic knowledge as it is derived purely from statistical and structural information of the network. The experimental results point out that selectivity-based keyword extraction has a great potential for the collection-oriented keyword extraction task.

This study aims to provide insights into the COVID-19-related communication on Twitter in the Republic of Croatia. For that purpose, we developed an NL-based framework that enables automatic analysis of a large dataset of tweets in the Croatian language. We collected and analysed 206,196 tweets related to COVID-19 and constructed a dataset of 10,000 tweets which we manually annotated with a sentiment label. We trained the Cro-CoV-cseBERT language model for the representation and clustering of tweets. Additionally, we compared the performance of four machine learning algorithms on the task of sentiment classification. After identifying the best performing setup of NLP methods, we applied the proposed framework in the task of characterisation of COVID-19 tweets in Croatia. More precisely, we performed sentiment analysis and tracked the sentiment over time. Furthermore, we detected how tweets are grouped into clusters with similar themes across three pandemic waves. Additionally, we characterised the tweets by analysing the distribution of sentiment polarity (in each thematic cluster and over time) and the number of retweets (in each thematic cluster and sentiment class). These results could be useful for additional research and interpretation in the domains of sociology, psychology or other sciences, as well as for the authorities, who could use them to address crisis communication problems.

Background: Online media play an important role in public health emergencies and serve as essential communication platforms. Infoveillance of online media during the COVID-19 pandemic is an important step toward gaining a better understanding of crisis communication. Objective: The goal of this study was to perform a longitudinal analysis of the COVID-19–related content on online media based on natural language processing. Methods: We collected a data set of news articles published by Croatian online media during the first 13 months of the pandemic. First, we tested the correlations between the number of articles and the number of new daily COVID-19 cases. Second, we analyzed the content by extracting the most frequent terms and applied the Jaccard similarity coefficient. Third, we compared the occurrence of the pandemic-related terms during the two waves of the pandemic. Finally, we applied named entity recognition to extract the most frequent entities and tracked the dynamics of changes during the observation period. Results: The results showed no significant correlation between the number of articles and the number of new daily COVID-19 cases. Furthermore, there were high overlaps in the terminology used in all articles published during the pandemic with a slight shift in the pandemic-related terms between the first and the second waves. Finally, the findings indicate that the most influential entities have lower overlaps for the identified people and higher overlaps for locations and institutions. Conclusions: Our study shows that online media have a prompt response to the pandemic with a large number of COVID-19–related articles. There was a high overlap in the frequently used terms across the first 13 months, which may indicate the narrow focus of reporting in certain periods. However, the pandemic-related terminology is well-covered.

This paper addresses topic modelling in Croatian news articles related to COVID-19 pandemics and corresponding comments. We identify and analyze Croatian online news media's main topics for the first nine months of pandemics shedding some light on the leading themes covered in news articles and corresponding comments. Topics are derived automatically by training the model and calculating topics' coherence values. We report the results by listing the top 15 detected words in top 10 detected topics from the content of articles and corresponding comments. Our findings include the analysis of intersected topics and discussion of dissents. Obtained results are the first step toward better information monitoring and hopefully mitigating the infodemics effect in Croatia.

Benedikt Perak, Slobodan Beliga, Ana Meštrović. Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024). 2024.

Retweet prediction is an important task in the context of various problems, such as information spreading analysis, automatic fake news detection, social media monitoring, etc. In this study, we explore retweet prediction based on heterogeneous data sources. In order to classify a tweet according to the number of retweets, we combine features extracted from the multilayer network and text. More specifically, we introduce a multilayer framework for the multilayer network representation of Twitter. This formalism captures different users’ actions and complex relationships, as well as other key properties of communication on Twitter. Next, we select a set of local network measures from each layer and construct a set of multilayer network features. We also adopt a BERT-based language model, namely Cro-CoV-cseBERT, to capture the high-level semantics and structure of tweets as a set of text features. We then trained six machine learning (ML) algorithms: random forest, multilayer perceptron, light gradient boosting machine, category-embedding model, neural oblivious decision ensembles, and an attentive interpretable tabular learning model for the retweet-prediction task. We compared the performance of all six algorithms in three different setups: with text features only, with multilayer network features only, and with both feature sets. We evaluated all the setups in terms of standard evaluation measures. For this task, we first prepared an empirical dataset of 199,431 tweets in Croatian posted between 1 January 2020 and 31 May 2021. Our results indicate that the prediction model performs better by integrating multilayer network features with text features than by using only one set of features.