🧭 About POLAR

Polarization Analysis for Language Across Regions
A Global Research Initiative in Multilingual & Multicultural NLP

What Is POLAR?

POLAR is a multilingual, multicultural, and interdisciplinary initiative focused on detecting and understanding attitude polarization in online discourse. From political debates and religious conflicts to ethnic tensions and gender bias, polarized language fuels misunderstanding, hate, and social fragmentation—especially in online spaces.

We created POLAR to address this growing problem by bringing together AI, linguistics, sociology, and ethics to develop responsible NLP systems that work across languages, events, and cultures.

Why POLAR Matters

Conventional NLP tasks often focus on sentiment or toxicity in a single language or event context. But real-world polarization is more complex:

  • It occurs in multiple languages simultaneously
  • It evolves with current events
  • It uses implicit framing, not just explicit hate
  • It targets identities, ideologies, and institutions
  • It varies across cultures and political systems

POLAR fills this gap by designing resources, models, and benchmarks that can capture these nuances, offering a more realistic view of global online discourse.

What Does POLAR Do?

  • Develops multilingual datasets annotated for polarization
  • Supports low-resource languages and cross-cultural narratives
  • Designs interpretable models that show how and why text is polarizing
  • Collaborates globally with researchers, annotators, and domain experts
  • Drives responsible AI for social good, policy impact, and academic insight

Who Is Behind POLAR?

POLAR is led by an interdisciplinary team of:

  • Computational linguists and NLP researchers
  • Sociologists and political scientists
  • Annotators and native speakers from diverse linguistic backgrounds
  • Collaborators and contributors from universities and institutions worldwide

Our shared commitment is to open-source, ethically informed, and impact-driven research that bridges the gap between language and society.

Where to Learn More

Join Us

Whether you're a researcher, developer, social scientist, activist, or student, you can contribute to the POLAR mission. Participate in our SemEval task, help us annotate new languages, or collaborate on interpretability methods.

Together, we can make language technology more inclusive, accountable, and socially aware.