biglam/contentious_contexts

Contentious Contexts Corpus (ConConCor)

2,720 short extracts from Dutch newspapers published between 1890 and 1940, each built around a target word that may read as contentious today, with 21,800 annotations from 436 annotators judging whether that word's use in that context is contentious by present-day standards.

Built by Cultural AI — a collaboration of the KNAW Humanities Cluster and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica — for the EuropeanaTech Challenge for Europeana AI/ML datasets, and described in Brate et al., Capturing Contentiousness (K-CAP 2021). The creators' own datasheet is in the source repo.

The motivating problem is a curatorial one. Archives, libraries and museums hold descriptions and texts written in language that is offensive now and was unremarkable then, and they mostly want to keep the original wording while flagging it rather than silently rewriting it. Doing that at collection scale needs a way to tell which uses are contentious, which is what this corpus is for.

What is in the extracts

The extracts are OCR'd newspaper articles and they contain, in ordinary reportage, the vocabulary of Dutch colonial and early-20th-century society: racial and ethnic slurs, colonial terms for people in the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, terms for disability, and period terms for sexuality and religion. There are 91 target words in all. Some are neutral by design — achtergrond, historisch, westers, etniciteit — and colonial and current place names are paired (batavia/jakarta), so the corpus is not a list of slurs with sentences attached.

The annotations are judgements, not facts. Annotators were asked whether a use is contentious from today's perspective; they disagree, and the disagreement is the signal the corpus was built to record.

Structure

One train split of 2,720 rows.

field	contents
extract_id	Identifier for the extract
text	The extract, roughly five sentences of OCR'd article text
target	The target word as it appears in text
annotator_responses_english	List of {id, response}, one per annotator
annotator_responses_dutch	The same responses in the original Dutch
annotator_suggestions	List of {id, suggestion} — free-text alternatives or other contentious terms spotted, Dutch only, often empty

The four responses, and how often each was given across all 21,800 annotations:

Dutch	English	count
Niet omstreden	Not contentious	13,386 (61.4%)
Omstreden naar huidige maatstaven	Contentious according to current standards	4,804 (22.0%)
Weet ik niet	I don't know	2,210 (10.1%)
Onleesbare OCR	Illegible OCR	1,400 (6.4%)

Things to check before you use it

There is no gold label, deliberately. Aggregation is left to you, because how you aggregate is a research choice. A plain majority vote over contentious-vs-not gives 496 extracts contentious, 2,070 not, and 154 tied.

The target word is marked with Unicode mathematical bold italic characters (U+1D400 block), not markup: 𝙄𝙣𝙙𝙤-𝙀𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙖𝙣, not Indo-Europeaan. Tokenisers will fragment those, and matching target against text fails until you normalise. unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", text) maps them back to ASCII — do it before anything else, and note that it also erases the marking, so record the offsets first if you need them.

Five extracts have 416 annotations each; the median is 7. c0 to c4 were shown to every annotator as shared calibration items. They will dominate any annotator-agreement calculation that treats extracts as equally weighted. At the other end, 45 extracts carry a single annotation.

6.4% of annotations say the OCR is illegible. This is Europeana newspaper OCR from 1890–1940 originals, and quality varies. Counting Illegible OCR votes per extract is a usable proxy for OCR quality, and a reasonable filter.

Expert and crowd annotators are not distinguished in these fields. The paper's central finding is that experts and crowdworkers judge contentiousness differently, but the HF fields carry only an anonymised ID. In the source repo the 413 Prolific crowdworkers are those listed in Demographics.csv; the remaining 23 IDs are not. Reconstructing the split means going back to the source CSVs.

It is Dutch, and it is dated. Judgements were collected in 2021 from present-day Dutch speakers about 1890–1940 Dutch text. Neither the vocabulary nor the sensibilities transfer to other languages, other periods, or a moderation task on contemporary text.

Aggregating the annotations

from collections import Counter

def ocr_score(example):
    """1.0 = no annotator found the OCR illegible."""
    responses = [r["response"] for r in example["annotator_responses_english"]]
    bad = Counter(responses).get("Illegible OCR", 0)
    return round(1 - bad / len(responses), 3)

def majority_vote(example):
    """Returns 'contentious', 'not_contentious', or 'tied'."""
    counts = Counter(r["response"] for r in example["annotator_responses_english"])
    c = counts.get("Contentious according to current standards", 0)
    n = counts.get("Not contentious", 0)
    return "contentious" if c > n else "not_contentious" if n > c else "tied"

Loading

This repo still ships a legacy loading script, so load_dataset("biglam/contentious_contexts") raises RuntimeError: Dataset scripts are no longer supported on datasets v4 and later. Until it is converted, read the CSVs directly from the source repo — Extracts.csv and Annotations.csv join on extract_id, and Metadata.csv adds newspaper title, date and place for 2,719 of the 2,720 extracts.

Licence

CC-BY. The source newspaper images and OCR come from the Europeana Newspaper collection as provided by the KB, National Library of the Netherlands.

Citation

@inproceedings{brate2021capturing,
  author    = {Brate, Ryan and Nesterov, Andrei and Vogelmann, Valentin and
               van Ossenbruggen, Jacco and Hollink, Laura and van Erp, Marieke},
  title     = {Capturing Contentiousness: Constructing the Contentious Terms in Context Corpus},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th on Knowledge Capture Conference (K-CAP '21)},
  year      = {2021},
  pages     = {17--24},
  doi       = {10.1145/3460210.3493553}
}

@misc{ContentiousContextsCorpus2021,
  author       = {Cultural AI},
  title        = {Contentious Contexts Corpus},
  year         = {2021},
  publisher    = {GitHub},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/cultural-ai/ConConCor}},
}