Towards Fine-grained Classification of Climate Change related Social Media Text

With climate change becoming a cause of concern worldwide, it becomes essential to gauge people's reactions. This can help educate and spread awareness about it and help leaders improve decision-making. This work explores the fine-grained classification and Stance detection of climate change-related social media text. Firstly, we create two datasets, ClimateStance and ClimateEng, consisting of 3777 tweets each, posted during the 2019 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and comprehensively outline the dataset collection, annotation methodology, and dataset composition. Secondly, we propose the task of Climate Change prevention stance detection based on our proposed ClimateStance dataset. Thirdly, we propose a fine-grained classification based on the ClimateEng dataset, classifying social media text into five categories: Disaster, Ocean/Water, Agriculture/Forestry, Politics, and General. We benchmark both the datasets for climate change prevention stance detection and fine-grained classification using state-of-the-art methods in text classification. We also create a Reddit-based dataset for both the tasks, ClimateReddit, consisting of 6262 pseudo-labeled comments along with 329 manually annotated comments for the label. We then perform semi-supervised experiments for both the tasks and benchmark their results using the best-performing model for the supervised experiments. Lastly, we provide insights into the ClimateStance and ClimateReddit using part-of-speech tagging and named-entity recognition.