A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria
  and Ukraine in Slovene News Media
Jaya Caporusso Damar Hoogland Mojca Brglez Boshko Koloski Matthew Purver Senja Pollak
Dehumanisation involves the perception and or treatment of a social group's
members as less than human. This phenomenon is rarely addressed with
computational linguistic techniques. We adapt a recently proposed approach for
English, making it easier to transfer to other languages and to evaluate,
introducing a new sentiment resource, the use of zero-shot cross-lingual
valence and arousal detection, and a new method for statistical significance
testing. We then apply it to study attitudes to migration expressed in Slovene
newspapers, to examine changes in the Slovene discourse on migration between
the 2015-16 migration crisis following the war in Syria and the 2022-23 period
following the war in Ukraine. We find that while this discourse became more
negative and more intense over time, it is less dehumanising when specifically
addressing Ukrainian migrants compared to others.