LegitimNarrate: A Dataset for Analyzing Legitimation Mechanisms in Crowdfunding Narratives
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)
Abstract
New ventures face challenges due to their liability of newness and need to gain legitimacy within the context of crowdfunding to secure vital resources for growth and survival. Previous studies have primarily assessed crowdfunding success through structured metadata or social media analytics, often neglecting detailed examinations of campaign narratives. To fill this gap, we introduce LegitimNarrate, an expert-annotated dataset specifically designed to analyze legitimation mechanisms in crowdfunding narratives. This dataset comprises 97 Kickstarter campaign descriptions segmented into 4,954 sentences, each meticulously annotated by management experts according to theoretical legitimacy frameworks. We benchmark LegitimNarrate with various contextual sentence-classification methods. This resource facilitates comprehensive research on discursive legitimacy and the role of narrative in crowdfunding contexts.