Creation of Polish Online News Corpus for Political Polarization Studies

In this paper we describe a Polish news corpus as an attempt to create a filtered, organized and representative set of texts coming from contemporary online press articles from two major Polish TV news providers: commercial TVN24 and state-owned TVP Info. The process consists of web scraping, data cleaning and formatting. A random sample was selected from prepared data to perform a classification task. The random forest achieved the best prediction results out of all considered models. We believe that this dataset is a valuable contribution to existing Polish language corpora as online news are considered to be formal and relatively mistake-free, therefore, a reliable source of correct written language, unlike other online platforms such as blogs or social media. Furthermore, to our knowledge, such corpus from this period of time has not been created before. In the future we would like to expand this dataset with articles coming from other online news providers, repeat the classification task on a bigger scale, utilizing other algorithms. Our data analysis outcomes might be a relevant basis to improve research on a political polarization and propaganda techniques in media.