Fine-Tuning Language Models on Dutch Protest Event Tweets

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Being able to obtain timely information about an event, like a protest, becomes increasingly more relevant with the rise of affective polarisation and social unrest over the world. Nowadays, large-scale protests tend to be organised and broadcast through social media. Analysing social media platforms like X has proven to be an effective method to follow events during a protest. Thus, we trained several language models on Dutch tweets to analyse their ability to classify if a tweet expresses discontent, considering these tweets may contain practical information about a protest. Our results show that models pre-trained on Twitter data, including Bernice and TwHIN-BERT, outperform models that are not. Additionally, the results showed that Sentence Transformers is a promising model. The added value of oversampling is greater for models that were not trained on Twitter data. In line with previous work, preprocessing the data did not help a transformer language model to make better predictions.