ISAAC Corpus Released: Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

Summary:The University of Illinois has released the Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC), an open corpus of over 527 million English-language Reddit posts related to six key social group distinctions: race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone, covering the period from 2007 to 2023. ISAAC employs a multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline to ensure irrelevant content remains below 10%. Each post is algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region and a sui

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Key Breakthroughs

• Large-Scale Corpus Construction: ISAAC includes over 527 million Reddit posts related to six key social group distinctions, spanning 17 years from 2007 to 2023, providing a rich data resource for studying social group discourse.
• Multi-Step Filtering and Annotation: ISAAC employs a multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline to ensure irrelevant content remains below 10%. Each post is algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region and a suite of semantic labels, including moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization.
• Unified Infrastructure: ISAAC offers a unified infrastructure that supports cross-category comparisons, long-term trend tracking, and spatial variation analysis, eliminating research fragmentation.
• Scalability: The modular design of ISAAC allows for easy extension to new platforms, languages, and social categories, providing flexibility for future research.

Technical Highlights

• Multi-Level Filtering and Auditing: ISAAC uses a multi-level filtering mechanism to ensure data quality and reduce the impact of irrelevant content on research.
• Semantic Annotation and Geolocation: Posts are annotated with semantic labels and geolocation information, providing richer contextual information for research.
• Public Accessibility: ISAAC is accessible both through a point-and-click website and labeler web-apps, as well as programmatically via an SQL playground, a Python package, and HuggingFace, catering to different research needs.

Industry Impact

• Advancing Social Group Studies: ISAAC provides new tools and data resources for social group discourse studies, helping to deepen understanding of social attitudes and trends.
• Promoting AI and Social Science Integration: The release of ISAAC promotes the application of AI technology in social science research, opening up new possibilities for interdisciplinary research.
• Supporting Policy Making: By providing long-term trend and spatial variation analysis, ISAAC can provide valuable reference information for policy makers, supporting more effective decision-making.

Developer Recommendations

• Data Usage and Ethics: Developers should adhere to relevant ethical guidelines when using ISAAC data, ensuring the legality and reasonableness of data usage.
• Extension and Customization: Developers can leverage ISAAC's modular design to extend the corpus or customize the annotation process to meet specific research needs.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Encouraging developers to collaborate with social science researchers to jointly explore the application potential of AI technology in social research.

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Source: ArXiv NLP/LLM (cs.CL) (2026-09-24)

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Tags: #ISAAC #Open Corpus #Social Group Studies #AI and Social Science #Data Annotation