“#DisabledOnIndianTwitter” : A Dataset towards Understanding the Expression of People with Disabilities on Indian Twitter

AbstractTwitter serves as a powerful tool for self-expression among the disabled people. To understand how disabled people in India use Twitter, we introduce a manually annotated corpus #DisabledOnIndianTwitter comprising of 2,384 tweets posted by 27 female and 15 male users. These users practice diverse professions and engage in varied online discourses on disability in India. To examine patterns in their Twitter use, we propose a novel hierarchical annotation taxonomy to classify the tweets into various themes including discrimination, advocacy, and self-identification. Using these annotations, we benchmark the corpus leveraging state-of-the-art classifiers. Finally through a mixed-methods analysis on our annotated corpus, we reveal stark differences in self-expression between male and female disabled users on Indian Twitter.