BTPD: A Multilingual Hand-curated Dataset of Bengali Transnational Political Discourse Across Online Communities

TL;DR

This paper introduces BTPD, a comprehensive multilingual dataset of Bengali transnational political discourse from online communities, addressing resource gaps in under-represented languages for political analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel hand-curated dataset of Bengali political discourse across multiple online platforms, including collection methodology and content overview.

Findings

Dataset covers diverse community structures and interaction dynamics

Provides insights into topics and multilingual content in Bengali political discourse

Addresses resource scarcity in under-resourced language analysis

Abstract

Understanding political discourse in online spaces is crucial for analyzing public opinion and ideological polarization. While social computing and computational linguistics have explored such discussions in English, such research efforts are significantly limited in major yet under-resourced languages like Bengali due to the unavailability of datasets. In this paper, we present a multilingual dataset of Bengali transnational political discourse (BTPD) collected from three online platforms, each representing distinct community structures and interaction dynamics. Besides describing how we hand-curated the dataset through community-informed keyword-based retrieval, this paper also provides a general overview of its topics and multilingual content.