Detecting Calls to Action in Multimodal Content: Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Instagram

This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram stories and 712 posts using fine-tuned BERT models and OpenAI's GPT-4 models. The fine-tuned BERT model incorporating synthetic training data achieved a macro F1 score of 0.93, demonstrating a robust classification performance. Our analysis revealed that 49.58% of Instagram posts and 10.64% of stories contained CTAs, highlighting significant differences in mobilization strategies between these content types. Additionally, we found that FDP and the Greens had the highest prevalence of CTAs in posts, whereas CDU and CSU led in story CTAs.

GERestaurant: A German Dataset of Annotated Restaurant Reviews for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

We present GERestaurant, a novel dataset consisting of 3,078 German language restaurant reviews manually annotated for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). All reviews were collected from Tripadvisor, covering a diverse selection of restaurants, including regional and international cuisine with various culinary styles. The annotations encompass both implicit and explicit aspects, including all aspect terms, their corresponding aspect categories, and the sentiments expressed towards them. Furthermore, we provide baseline scores for the four ABSA tasks Aspect Category Detection, Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis, End-to-End ABSA and Target Aspect Sentiment Detection as a reference point for future advances. The dataset fills a gap in German language resources and facilitates exploration of ABSA in the restaurant domain.

Innovations in Cover Song Detection: A Lyrics-Based Approach

Cover songs are alternate versions of a song by a different artist. Long being a vital part of the music industry, cover songs significantly influence music culture and are commonly heard in public venues. The rise of online music platforms has further increased their prevalence, often as background music or video soundtracks. While current automatic identification methods serve adequately for original songs, they are less effective with cover songs, primarily because cover versions often significantly deviate from the original compositions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for cover song detection that utilizes the lyrics of a song. We introduce a new dataset for cover songs and their corresponding originals. The dataset contains 5078 cover songs and 2828 original songs. In contrast to other cover song datasets, it contains the annotated lyrics for the original song and the cover song. We evaluate our method on this dataset and compare it with multiple baseline approaches. Our results show that our method outperforms the baseline approaches.