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Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1666

Merullo, Jack; Yeh, Luke; Handler, Abram; Grissom II, Alvin; O’Connor, Brendan; Iyyer, Mohit (January 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP))

Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince commentator bias in sports broadcasts. To examine this phenomenon, we assemble FOOTBALL, which contains 1,455 broadcast transcripts from American football games across six decades that are automatically annotated with 250K player mentions and linked with racial metadata. We identify major confounding factors for researchers examining racial bias in FOOTBALL, and perform a computational analysis that supports conclusions from prior social science studies.

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