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This seems weirdly not insightful to me. Did anyone else learn anything they didn't already know, or which they wouldn't consider obvious? Given 70 million com

This seems weirdly not insightful to me. Did anyone else learn anything they didn't already know, or which they wouldn't consider obvious? Given 70 million comments I might hope for something more, like perhaps a proposition as to how to better automatically catch the bad comments without having to have moderators at all, via some sort of lexical analysis of the good ones versus the bad ones from this manually sorted set. Would the Guardian be willing to release the data set for others to analyse?

DanBC 11y ago
We know that everyone online can be a target of abuse. But I wasn't sure how balanced the abuse was. I frequently see on HN people saying "but trolls are trolls; they don't target women, they target everyone and the misogyny is just a useful troll tool to provoke reaction". It's useful to me to see some attempt to quantify this and to get some numbers that show what the balance is.
- makomk 11y ago
  It's less revealing than they claim, I think. The Guardian has some incredibly inflammatory and dishonest opinion pieces and articles and most of them seem to be by women (and a small handful of women at that), and their comment rules consider merely pointing out the problems with them deletion-worthy a lot of the time. There's actually a long-running joke in the comment section about how much above-the-line content would be considered abusive and deleted if it was posted as comments. The obvious example that springs to mind would be Germaine Greer's article in the sports section which was nominally about Caster Semenya but mostly just attacked trans women, who she's got a particular dislike for. Little chance a male Guardian journalist would get that through editorial, no chance it'd be allowed in the comments, and since she's not even a sports writer normally there's no non-inflammatory articles from her to counterbalance it.
bonniemuffin 11y ago
It would be awesome to have such a large corpus of labeled comments available for people to train spam detection models. I'd love to know more about what kind of text features tend to predict spam.
- tyingq 11y ago
  It's not especially large, but there is a SenTube corpus that's 16MB of labeled comments from YouTube videos. The main purpose does seem to be sentiment analysis, but there are labels for spam and off-topic comments. http://ikernels-portal.disi.unitn.it/projects/sentube/ http://ikernels-portal.disi.unitn.it/projects/sentube/
dominotw 11y ago
>Did anyone else learn anything they didn't already know, or which they wouldn't consider obvious? "Our list of authors contains the approximately 12,000 individuals" so guardian is more like a blog aggregator ?
- eterm 11y ago
  It doesn't aggregate, it is it's own platform "comment is free".
- takno 11y ago
  This covers articles published in a large daily newpaper over 20 years. The CIF section in latter years does provide an online-only platform for blog-standard articles from enthusiastic amateurs, but I would have thought that most of the 12,000 made it into the print version as well.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    There are 7.2k days in 20 years, and each day's paper has plenty of space for guest columnists/etc. so seems could even be easy enough to hit 12k even without CIF content.
r721 11y ago
Last paragraph says they plan to do some NLP analysis: >In the future, we would like to explore the words used in the comments, using standard and bespoke natural language processing algorithms.
- aerovistae 11y ago
  Missed that, good eye.
pascalmemories 11y ago
I doubt they will release it for others to analyze. There's some interesting things from a tech perspective - use of Postgres, Perl scripts etc. That was fun to find out. Unfortunately the Guardian is in regular battle over their comments, particularly in respect to how they handle comment regarding Israel - they are frequently accused of suppressing anything 'pro' (by deleting entire commenter accounts as breaches of their rules) and retaining some quite alarming comments (on Israel and other subjects) by classifying as free speech and retaining despite complaints - see [1] for 68 'recommends' for killing Tony Blair being kept. This looks like an attempt to bypass some serious issues by intentionally addressing something completely tangential. A classic diversionary tactic. That's why I think you (or anyone else) is unlikely to get access to the data. Which is a pity, because it could help clear up exactly these issues of claimed bias they are accused of, and help determine if it exists or not. - something useful. [1] https://ukmediawatch.org/2011/12/31/cif-commenter-suggests-tony-blair-should-be-killed-68-recommends-not-deleted-by-cif-moderators/ https://ukmediawatch.org/2011/12/31/cif-commenter-suggests-t...
mkagenius 11y ago
Atleast "good" comments would be available via http://developer.nytimes.com/docs http://developer.nytimes.com/docs since they are moderated (probably guardian is moderated too, didn't read the article yet)

DanBC 11y ago

We know that everyone online can be a target of abuse. But I wasn't sure how balanced the abuse was. I frequently see on HN people saying "but trolls are trolls; they don't target women, they target everyone and the misogyny is just a useful troll tool to provoke reaction". It's useful to me to see some attempt to quantify this and to get some numbers that show what the balance is.

makomk 11y ago
It's less revealing than they claim, I think. The Guardian has some incredibly inflammatory and dishonest opinion pieces and articles and most of them seem to be by women (and a small handful of women at that), and their comment rules consider merely pointing out the problems with them deletion-worthy a lot of the time. There's actually a long-running joke in the comment section about how much above-the-line content would be considered abusive and deleted if it was posted as comments. The obvious example that springs to mind would be Germaine Greer's article in the sports section which was nominally about Caster Semenya but mostly just attacked trans women, who she's got a particular dislike for. Little chance a male Guardian journalist would get that through editorial, no chance it'd be allowed in the comments, and since she's not even a sports writer normally there's no non-inflammatory articles from her to counterbalance it.

bonniemuffin 11y ago

It would be awesome to have such a large corpus of labeled comments available for people to train spam detection models. I'd love to know more about what kind of text features tend to predict spam.

tyingq 11y ago
It's not especially large, but there is a SenTube corpus that's 16MB of labeled comments from YouTube videos. The main purpose does seem to be sentiment analysis, but there are labels for spam and off-topic comments. http://ikernels-portal.disi.unitn.it/projects/sentube/ http://ikernels-portal.disi.unitn.it/projects/sentube/

dominotw 11y ago

>Did anyone else learn anything they didn't already know, or which they wouldn't consider obvious? "Our list of authors contains the approximately 12,000 individuals" so guardian is more like a blog aggregator ?

eterm 11y ago
It doesn't aggregate, it is it's own platform "comment is free".
takno 11y ago
This covers articles published in a large daily newpaper over 20 years. The CIF section in latter years does provide an online-only platform for blog-standard articles from enthusiastic amateurs, but I would have thought that most of the 12,000 made it into the print version as well.
- corin_ 11y ago
  There are 7.2k days in 20 years, and each day's paper has plenty of space for guest columnists/etc. so seems could even be easy enough to hit 12k even without CIF content.

r721 11y ago

Last paragraph says they plan to do some NLP analysis: >In the future, we would like to explore the words used in the comments, using standard and bespoke natural language processing algorithms.

aerovistae 11y ago
Missed that, good eye.

pascalmemories 11y ago

I doubt they will release it for others to analyze. There's some interesting things from a tech perspective - use of Postgres, Perl scripts etc. That was fun to find out. Unfortunately the Guardian is in regular battle over their comments, particularly in respect to how they handle comment regarding Israel - they are frequently accused of suppressing anything 'pro' (by deleting entire commenter accounts as breaches of their rules) and retaining some quite alarming comments (on Israel and other subjects) by classifying as free speech and retaining despite complaints - see [1] for 68 'recommends' for killing Tony Blair being kept. This looks like an attempt to bypass some serious issues by intentionally addressing something completely tangential. A classic diversionary tactic. That's why I think you (or anyone else) is unlikely to get access to the data. Which is a pity, because it could help clear up exactly these issues of claimed bias they are accused of, and help determine if it exists or not. - something useful. [1] https://ukmediawatch.org/2011/12/31/cif-commenter-suggests-tony-blair-should-be-killed-68-recommends-not-deleted-by-cif-moderators/ https://ukmediawatch.org/2011/12/31/cif-commenter-suggests-t...

mkagenius 11y ago

Atleast "good" comments would be available via http://developer.nytimes.com/docs http://developer.nytimes.com/docs since they are moderated (probably guardian is moderated too, didn't read the article yet)