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Mobilize, Inform, Interact: Classifying Political Calls-to-Action Types on Instagram
Achmann-Denkler, Michael
, Haim, Mario, Helmig, Clara, Fehle, Jakob
and Wolff, Christian
(2026)
Mobilize, Inform, Interact: Classifying Political Calls-to-Action Types on Instagram.
In: The 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026), Co-located with LREC 2026 — 11–16 May 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Date of publication of this fulltext: 20 May 2026 07:02
Conference or workshop item
DOI to cite this document: 10.5283/epub.79453
Abstract
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are central to digital campaigning, yet computational research has largely focused on binary detection only. We address CTA type classification in German Instagram campaign texts (posts and ephemeral Stories), distinguishing Support, Inform, Interact, and No CTA. With limited annotated data, we benchmark a fine-tuned GBERT model against GPT models using zero-shot, few-shot, ...
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are central to digital campaigning, yet computational research has largely focused on binary detection only. We address CTA type classification in German Instagram campaign texts (posts and ephemeral Stories), distinguishing Support, Inform, Interact, and No CTA. With limited annotated data, we benchmark a fine-tuned GBERT model against GPT models using zero-shot, few-shot, and retrieval-augmented few-shot prompting in a multi-label setup. Both approaches reach similar performance in five-fold cross-validation (macro-F1 ≈ 0.79), with persistent difficulty on the rare Interact category. As a proof of concept, we apply the selected setup to the 2021 federal election corpus and show that parties varied not only in overall CTA use but also in how they balanced appeals across posts versus Stories. The results demonstrate the feasibility of CTA type classification with modest data and position retrieval-augmented prompting as a practical alternative to supervised fine-tuning.
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Details
| Item type | Conference or workshop item (Poster) |
| ISBN | 978-2-493814-76-0 |
| Title of Book: | The 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences (PoliticalNLP 2026) @ LREC 2026 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |
| Open Access Type: | CC-License |
| Place of Publication: | Palma de Mallorca |
| Page Range: | pp. 131-138 |
| Date | 16 May 2026 |
| Institutions | Languages and Literatures > Institut für Information und Medien, Sprache und Kultur (I:IMSK) > Lehrstuhl für Medieninformatik (Prof. Dr. Christian Wolff) Informatics and Data Science > Department Human-Centered Computing > Lehrstuhl für Medieninformatik (Prof. Dr. Christian Wolff) |
| Keywords | political communication, calls-to-action, multi-label classification, Instagram Stories, retrieval-augmented prompting, German federal election |
| Dewey Decimal Classification | 000 Computer science, information & general works > 004 Computer science |
| Status | Published |
| Refereed | Yes, this version has been refereed |
| Created at the University of Regensburg | Partially |
| URN of the UB Regensburg | urn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-794539 |
| Item ID | 79453 |
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