ConteCorpus: An Analysis of People Response to Institutional Communications During the Pandemic

The study of institutional communication related to the pandemic, and to the population's response to it, is of great relevance today. The Italian spokesperson for communication regarding the pandemic has been, during the year 2020, the former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. We retrieved 4,860,395 comments from his Facebook official page and built the ConteCorpus, a new Italian resource annotated in CoNLL-U format. A first aim of the research was to evaluate the performance of the model used to annotate the corpus. Models trained on social media texts are usually not very generalizable. Nevertheless, the results of the evaluation were good, especially in parsing metrics, and showed that a parser trained on Twitter data can be successfully applied to Facebook data. A second aim of the research was to provide an overall view of the content of such a large corpus; for this purpose, topic modeling was conducted, training an LDA model. The model generated 5 topics that cover different aspects linked to the pandemic emergency, from economic to political issues. Through the topic modeling we investigated which topics are prevalent on particular days.