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Sentiment Analysis of Media in German on the Refugee Crisis in Europe

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Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries (ISCRAM-med 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 265))

Abstract

Since the summer of 2015, the refugee crisis in Europe has grown to be one of the biggest challenges Europe has faced since WW2. The development of this humanitarian crisis are the topic of discussions throughout Europe and covered by media on a daily basis. Germany in particular has been the focus of migration. Over time, in Germany and the neighboring German speaking countries a shift could be observed, from the initial hospitable Willkommenskultur (welcome culture), to more reserved and skeptical points of view. These factors - Germany as the prime-destination for migrants, as well as a shift in public perception and media coverage - are the motivation for our analysis. The current article investigates the coverage of this crisis on traditional and social media, employing sentiment analysis to detect tendencies and relates these to real-world events. To this end, sentiment analysis was applied to textual documents of a data-set collected from relevant and highly circulated German, Austrian and Swiss traditional media sources and from social media in the course of six months from October 2015 to March of 2016.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Information about these events has been taken from http://zeitstrahl- flüchtlingskrise.org, providing excellent coverage and history of events concerning the refugee crisis, accessed on 2016/06/08.

  2. 2.

    Pegida: Patriotische Europäer gegen Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), www.pegida.de.

  3. 3.

    Germany: Passauer Neue Presse, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Focus, Welt, Spiegel; Austria: Der Standard, Kleine Zeitung, Salzburger Nachrichten, Die Presse, Wiener Zeitung; Switzerland: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Aargauer Zeitung, Tagesanzeiger, Basler Zeitung, 20 Minuten.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SAIL LABS Technology GmbH, Vienna, Austria

    Gerhard Backfried & Gayane Shalunts

Authors
  1. Gerhard Backfried
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  2. Gayane Shalunts
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gerhard Backfried .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid , Madrid, Spain

    Paloma Díaz

  2. ENSI, Maounba University ENSI, Tunis, Tunisia

    Narjès Bellamine Ben Saoud

  3. LIG, University of Grenoble LIG, St Martin d'Heres, France

    Julie Dugdale

  4. University of Toulouse Capitole , Toulouse, France

    Chihab Hanachi

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Backfried, G., Shalunts, G. (2016). Sentiment Analysis of Media in German on the Refugee Crisis in Europe. In: Díaz, P., Bellamine Ben Saoud, N., Dugdale, J., Hanachi, C. (eds) Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries. ISCRAM-med 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 265. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47093-1_20

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