PHEME D2.1: Development of an Annotation Scheme for Social Media Rumours

Arkaitz Zubiaga, Peter Tolmie, Maria Liakata, Rob Procter

PHEME FP7 deliverable. 2014.

This document outlines a preliminary definition of an annotation scheme for rumours spread through social media, as well as the code frames that will be used to mark up the corpora collected for PHEME. It has been developed through an iterative process of revisions, and it is intended to encompass the different kinds of rumours that can be spread and discussed in the context of different events and situations. It especially considers the way conversations flow in social media, and has been developed in an interdisciplinary style by building on work in sociolinguistics, including the related approaches of Conversation Analysis [51] and Ethnomethodology [16]. The resulting annotation scheme will be used for the annotation of a larger corpora of social media rumours through a crowdsourcing platform. Annotation guidelines will be defined in following work and tested with small social media corpora before running the large annotation task.