POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization

Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and multievent dataset with over 23k instances in seven languages from diverse online platforms and real-world events. Polarization is annotated along three axes: presence, type, and manifestation, using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. We conduct two main experiments: (1) we fine-tune six multilingual pretrained language models in both monolingual and cross-lingual setups; and (2) we evaluate a range of open and closed large language models (LLMs) in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Results show that while most models perform well on binary polarization detection, they achieve substantially lower scores when predicting polarization types and manifestations. These findings highlight the complex, highly contextual nature of polarization and the need for robust, adaptable approaches in NLP and computational social science. All resources will be released to support further research and effective mitigation of digital polarization globally.

Learning Graph Embeddings from WordNet-based Similarity Measures

We present a new approach for learning graph embeddings, that relies on structural measures of node similarities for generation of training data. The model learns node embeddings that are able to approximate a given measure, such as the shortest path distance or any other. Evaluations of the proposed model on semantic similarity and word sense disambiguation tasks (using WordNet as the source of gold similarities) show that our method yields state-of-the-art results, but also is capable in certain cases to yield even better performance than the input similarity measure. The model is computationally efficient, orders of magnitude faster than the direct computation of graph distances.

Combining Graph-based Dependency Features with Convolutional Neural Network for Answer Triggering

Answer triggering is the task of selecting the best-suited answer for a given question from a set of candidate answers if exists. In this paper, we present a hybrid deep learning model for answer triggering, which combines several dependency graph based alignment features, namely graph edit distance, graph-based similarity and dependency graph coverage, with dense vector embeddings from a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our experiments on the WikiQA dataset show that such a combination can more accurately trigger a candidate answer compared to the previous state-of-the-art models. Comparative study on WikiQA dataset shows 5.86% absolute F-score improvement at the question level.