6,242 research outputs found
Collective emotions online and their influence on community life
E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an
object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet
exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional
information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group
members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners
in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges
affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects
of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment
analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using
text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in
e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or
if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group
activities. We show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large
scale as observed in 4 million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC
forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the
emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar
emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it
would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can
be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for
consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum
threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute
average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of
emotion in messages fell during discussions. Our results prove that collective
emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and
that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.Comment: 23 pages including Supporting Information, accepted to PLoS ON
Comprehensive Review of Opinion Summarization
The abundance of opinions on the web has kindled the study of opinion summarization over the last few years. People have introduced various techniques and paradigms to solving this special task. This survey attempts to systematically investigate the different techniques and approaches used in opinion summarization. We provide a multi-perspective classification of the approaches used and highlight some of the key weaknesses of these approaches. This survey also covers evaluation techniques and data sets used in studying the opinion summarization problem. Finally, we provide insights into some of the challenges that are left to be addressed as this will help set the trend for future research in this area.unpublishednot peer reviewe
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