Probing the discourses of climate change (CC)
What can automatic text mining reveal about CC communication?
In a series of interrelated student projects, spanning across several seminars and research modules since 2020, we apply text mining methods to a variety of text corpora (some of which we built ourselves). The overarching goal is to identify patterns, opinions and arguments brought forward in different CC discourses.
A video that introduces five of our recent student projects (largely in German), targeting the general public, is available at the online "Potsdamer Tag der Wissenschaften" 2021 here.
Corpora
- GerCCT: 12.000 pairs of German Climate Change Tweets, collected at DRL (see Schäfer/Stede 2020 below)
- NatSciCC: 490 editorials from Nature and Science (1966-2015), manually annotated by Hulme et al. 2018 for thematic framing categories. We built a digital version of the corpus.
- NYTAC: New York Times Annotated Corpus. We identified 10.000 articles related to CC.
- CMV-CC: A CC subset of the "Change My View" subreddit corpus compiled by Webis.
Glossary
- Glossary: We built a linguistically-oriented online glossary of 250 German climate compound nouns used in politically-oriented discourse
Activities
- Framing in NatSciCC: Following up on the work of Hulme et al. 2018, we analyze the linguistics of framing in editorials.
- Classifying the NatSciCC texts: Focusing on the problem of imbalanced data, we aim at automatically reconstructing the topic frame annotations by Hulme et al. 2018 (see Bracke 2020 below).
- Tracking CC in NYTAC: We use unsupervised methods to detect patterns in CC reporting in The New York Times (1987-2007).
- Argumentation in Twitter exchanges: We study various subtaks of argumentation mining on the GerCCT corpus.
- News headlines: We searched the archives of German newspapers for climate change articles, collected their headlines and study trends of term usage
People
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BSc students 2022 (Computational Linguistics): Noël Simmel
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MSc students 2022 (Cognitive Systems): Raunak Agarwal, Luka Borec, Anna Goecke, Juliane Hanel, Neele Charlotte Kinkel, Nailia Mirzakhmedova
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PhD student: Robin Schäfer
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Inter/national collaborators: Nic Badullovich (ANU Climate Change Institute, Canberra), Ronny Patz (Hertie School, Berlin), Patrick Saint-Dizier (Univ. Paul Sabatier, Toulouse), Maria Skeppstedt (Inst. for Language and Folklore, Sweden)
Contact
- Manfred Stede (stede@uni-potsdam.de)
Related publications:
- Manfred Stede and Ronja Memminger. AAfD-CCC: Analyzing the Climate Change Discourse\\ of a German Right-wing Political Party. In Proceedings of the 4th NLP for Positive Impact Workshop (NLP4PI) at ACL. Vienna, 2025. (to appear). [Bibtex]
- Francesca Grasso, Stefano Locci, and Manfred Stede. Applying the Character-Role Narrative Framework with LLMs to Investigate Environmental Narratives in Scientific Editorials and Tweets. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop of Natural Language Processing meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP) at ACL. Vienna, 2025. (to appear). [Bibtex]
- Francesca Grasso, Ronny Patz, and Manfred Stede. NYTAC-CC: A Climate Change Subcorpus based on New York Times Articles. In Proceedings of CLiC-it - 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics. Pisa, Italy, 2024. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- Manfred Stede, Yannic Bracke, Luka Borec, Neele Charlotte Kinkel, and Maria Skeppstedt. Framing Climate Change in Nature and Science Editorials: Applications of Supervised and Unsupervised Text Categorization. Computational Social Science, 2023. [Bibtex] [DOI]
- Robin Schaefer, Christoph M. Abels, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Manfred Stede. Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis. Toronto, Canada and Online, July 2023. Association for Computational Linguistics. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- M. Stede, A. Goecke, N. Simmel, and B. Schneider. Der reine Klimawahnsinn! Zur Konzeption eines Diskursglossars von Klimakomposita. In M. Beißwenger, E. Gredel, L. Lemnitzer, and R. Schneider, editors, Korpusgestütze Sprachanalyse - Grundlagen, Anwendungen und Analysen. Narr, Tübingen, 2023. [Bibtex]
- Juliane Hanel. Transformer-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse and Green Party Evolution in German Party Manifestos. Unpublished M.Sc. Thesis, 2023. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- Robin Schaefer and Manfred Stede. GerCCT: An Annotated Corpus for Mining Arguments in German Tweets on Climate Change. In Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). Marseille, France, 2022. European Language Resources Association. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- Noël Simmel. Klimaretter oder Klimaspinner? Entwicklung einer Web-App zum Klimawandeldiskurs. Unpublished B.Sc. Thesis, 2022. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- M. Stede and R. Patz. The climate change debate and natural language processing. In Proc. of the 1st Workshop on NLP for positive impact (ACL). Online, 2021. [Bibtex] [PDF]
- Yannic Bracke. Automatic text classification with imbalanced data: Building a frame classifier from a corpus of editorials. Unpublished B.Sc. Thesis, 2020. [Bibtex]
- Robin Schäfer and Manfred Stede. Annotation and detection of arguments in tweets. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Argument Mining, 53–58. Online, December 2020. Association for Computational Linguistics. [Bibtex] [PDF]