The InsightsNet Climate Change Corpus (ICCC)

Abstract

The discourse on climate change has become a centerpiece of public debate, thereby creating a pressing need to analyze the multitude of messages created by the participants in this communication process. In addition to text, information on this topic is conveyed multimodally, through images, videos, tables and other data objects that are embedded within documents and accompany the text. This paper presents the process of building a multimodal pilot corpus to the InsightsNet Climate Change Corpus (ICCC) and using natural language processing (NLP) tools to enrich corpus (meta)data, thus creating a dataset that lends itself to the exploration of the interplay between the various modalities that constitute the discourse on climate change. We demonstrate how the pilot corpus can be queried for relevant information in two types of databases, and how the proposed data model promotes a more comprehensive sentiment analysis approach.