aav-ds/Israel-HAMAS_war_news

Dataset Card for Israel-HAMAS war news

Dataset Description

Point of Contact: Alexander Akhterov

Dataset Summary

The "Israel-HAMAS war news" dataset is an English-language dataset of news about Israel war against the terrorist organization - HAMAS that happened after "black Saturday" - massive murders of civilian Israeli people on the 7th of October 2023.

We've accumulated news from the following sources:

• BBC (live news) - from 2023-11-05 to 2023-11-18. Total: 805
• The Times of Israel (live news) - from 2023-10-07 to 2023-11-18. Total: 6581
• Al Jazeera (live news) - from 2023-11-04 to 2023-11-25. Total: 3297
• Al Mayadeen (articles from the site) - from 2023-10-08 to 2023-11-24. Total: 74
• WAFA "News" Agency (articles from the site section "Occupation")- from 2023-09-28 to 2023-11-26. Total: 1020
• CNN live news - from 2023-10-26 to 2023-11-26. Total: 1428

All news is collected using Beautiful Soup Python library. In the case of the BBC site, the WAFA site, and the Al Mayadeen site it was enough to use simple GET requests and in the other cases we used Silenium.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

sentiment-classification, semantic-similarity-classification: The idea behind the dataset is to fine-tune one of the LLMs to make a news sentiment analysis regarding the pro- and anti-Israel attitudes (but the collected dataset can be used also for other NLP tasks). One of the main issue is data labeling. To overcome it we suppose that almost all news from the Palestinian "news" agency "WAFA" and Lebanese agency "Al Mayadeen" has anti-Israel position. Most of the Al Jazeera news also tends to be against Israel. In return news by "The Times of Israel" is mostly pro-Israel.

For example, the following piece of news carries an anti-Israel pattern:

KHAN YUNIS, Sunday, December 10, 2023 (WAFA) - At least 10 civilians were killed, mostly children, and dozens more were wounded early this morning as Israeli warplanes bombed a residential house in Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli aggression on the enclave enters its 65th day in a row. (WAFA "news" agency).

On the contrary, the following information from "The Times of Israel" is pro-Israel:

Several thousand people demonstrate against antisemitism in Berlin as Germany grapples with a large increase in anti-Jewish incidents following Hamas’s assault on Israel two months ago. Police estimate that around 3,200 people gathered in the rain in the German capital, while organizers put the figure at 10,000, German news agency dpa reports. Participants in the protest, titled “Never again is now,” march to the Brandenburg Gate.

Languages

The text in the dataset is in English since most news is in English. The associated BCP-47 code is en.

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

{'url': 'https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/man-arrested-in-death-of-jewish-protester-during-dueling-california-rallies-over-war/',
 'datetime': '2023-11-16T18:36:15',
 'title': 'Man arrested in death of Jewish protester during dueling California rallies over war',
 'text': 'California authorities say they have arrested a man in connection with the death of a Jewish protester during demonstrations over the Israel-Hamas war.\nThe Ventura County Sheriff’s Office says the 50-year-old suspect was arrested today and will be booked into jail in the investigation of involuntary manslaughter — the unintentional killing of another person. The district attorney will decide whether there is enough evidence to bring a formal charge.\nPaul Kessler, 69, died early November 6 at a hospital following a November 5 confrontation with a pro-Palestinian demonstrator in Thousand Oaks, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles.\nSheriff Jim Fryhoff said subsequently that deputies determined Kessler had fallen backward and struck his head on the ground. The pro-Palestinian demonstrator stayed at the scene and told deputies he had called 911, Fryhoff said.',
 'provider': 'The Times of Israel',
 'source': 'site-live-news'}

Data Fields

• "url" - link to the piece of news;
• "datetime" - news date and time (YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS);
• "title" - news title;
• "text" - news text;
• "provider" - news providers, can be 'BBC', 'The Times of Israel', 'Al Jazeera', 'Al Mayadeen', 'WAFA News Agency', and 'CNN';
• "source" - where news was collected.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

The "Israel-HAMAS war news" dataset was built as a solution to the data annotation problem for the sentiment analysis task regarding the pro- and anti-Israel attitudes. We've supposed that almost all news from the Palestinian "news" agency "WAFA", Lebanese agency "Al Mayadeen", and Qatari "Al Jazeera" has anti-Israel position. In return news by "The Times of Israel" is mostly pro-Israel.

Source Data

The official sites of the news agencies are the sources of the dataset:

• The BBC - https://www.bbc.com/
• The Times of Israel - https://www.timesofisrael.com/
• Al Jazeera - https://www.aljazeera.com/
• Al Mayadeen - https://english.almayadeen.net/
• WAFA News Agency - https://english.wafa.ps/
• CNN - https://edition.cnn.com/

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The data was obtained by web scraping of the appropriate sections of the news agencies' official sites.

Annotations

The dataset does not contain any additional annotations.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The news authors were removed.