Motifs are distinctive, recurring, widely used idiom-like words or phrases, often originating from folklore, whose meaning are anchored in a narrative. Motifs have significance as communicative devices because they concisely imply a constellation of culturally relevant information. Their broad usage suggests their cognitive importance as touchstones of cultural knowledge. We present GOLEM, the first dataset annotated for motific information. The dataset comprises 7,955 English articles (2,039,424 words). The corpus identifies 26,078 motif candidates across 34 motif types from three cultural or national groups: Jewish, Irish, and Puerto Rican. Each motif candidate is labeled with the type of usage (Motific, Referential, Eponymic, or Unrelated), resulting in 1,723 actual motific instances. Annotation was performed by individuals identifying as members of each group and achieved a Fleiss’ kappa of >0.55. We demonstrate that classification of candidate type is a challenging task for LLMs using a few-shot approach; recent models such as T5, FLAN-T5, GPT-2, and Llama 2 (7B) achieved a performance of 41% accuracy at best. These data will support development of new models and approaches for detecting (and reasoning about) motific information in text. We release the corpus, the annotation guide, and the code to support other researchers building on this work.

Online messaging is dynamic, influential, and highly contextual, and a single post may contain contrasting sentiments towards multiple entities, such as dehumanizing one actor while empathizing with another in the same message. These complexities are important to capture for understanding the systematic abuse voiced within an online community, or for determining whether individuals are advocating for abuse, opposing abuse, or simply reporting abuse. In this work, we describe a formulation of directed social regard (DSR) as a problem of multi-entity aspect-based sentiment analysis (ME-ABSA), which models the degree of intensity of multiple sentiments that are associated with entities described by a text document. Our DSR schema is informed by Bandura’s psychosocial theory of moral disengagement and by recent work in ABSA. We present a dataset of over 2,900 posts and sentences, comprising over 24,000 entities annotated for DSR over nine psychosocial dimensions by three annotators. We present a novel transformer-based ME-ABSA model for DSR, achieving favorable preliminary results on this dataset.