CoNTACT : a Dutch COVID-19 adapted BERT for vaccine hesitancy and argumentation detection

Abstract: We present CoNTACT: a Dutch language model adapted to the domain of COVID-19 tweets. The model was developed by continuing the pre-training phase of RobBERT (Delobelle et al., 2020) by using 2.8M Dutch COVID-19 related tweets posted in 2021. In order to test the performance of the model and compare it to RobBERT, the two models were tested on two tasks: (1) binary vaccine hesitancy detection and (2) detection of arguments for vaccine hesitancy. For both tasks, not only Twitter but also Facebook data was used to show cross-genre performance. In our experiments, CoNTACT showed statisti... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Lemmens, Jens
Van Nooten, Jens
Kreutz, Tim
Daelemans, Walter
Dokumenttyp: conferenceObject
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Schlagwörter: Linguistics
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26673777
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1976070151162165141

Abstract: We present CoNTACT: a Dutch language model adapted to the domain of COVID-19 tweets. The model was developed by continuing the pre-training phase of RobBERT (Delobelle et al., 2020) by using 2.8M Dutch COVID-19 related tweets posted in 2021. In order to test the performance of the model and compare it to RobBERT, the two models were tested on two tasks: (1) binary vaccine hesitancy detection and (2) detection of arguments for vaccine hesitancy. For both tasks, not only Twitter but also Facebook data was used to show cross-genre performance. In our experiments, CoNTACT showed statistically significant gains over RobBERT in all experiments for task 1. For task 2, we observed substantial improvements in virtually all classes in all experiments. An error analysis indicated that the domain adaptation yielded better representations of domain-specific terminology, causing CoNTACT to make more accurate classification decisions. For task 2, we observed substantial improvements in virtually all classes in all experiments. An error analysis indicated that the domain adaptation yielded better representations of domain-specific terminology, causing CoNTACT to make more accurate classification decisions.