12,649 research outputs found
Tracking the History and Evolution of Entities: Entity-centric Temporal Analysis of Large Social Media Archives
How did the popularity of the Greek Prime Minister evolve in 2015? How did
the predominant sentiment about him vary during that period? Were there any
controversial sub-periods? What other entities were related to him during these
periods? To answer these questions, one needs to analyze archived documents and
data about the query entities, such as old news articles or social media
archives. In particular, user-generated content posted in social networks, like
Twitter and Facebook, can be seen as a comprehensive documentation of our
society, and thus meaningful analysis methods over such archived data are of
immense value for sociologists, historians and other interested parties who
want to study the history and evolution of entities and events. To this end, in
this paper we propose an entity-centric approach to analyze social media
archives and we define measures that allow studying how entities were reflected
in social media in different time periods and under different aspects, like
popularity, attitude, controversiality, and connectedness with other entities.
A case study using a large Twitter archive of four years illustrates the
insights that can be gained by such an entity-centric and multi-aspect
analysis.Comment: This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in the
International Journal on Digital Libraries (2018
Opponents and supporters of water policy change in the Netherlands and Hungary
This paper looks at the role of individuals and the strategies that they use to bring about or oppose major policy change. Current analysis of the role that individuals or small collectives play in periods of major policy change has focussed on strategies that reinforce change and on the supporters of change. This paper adds the perspective of opponents, and asks whether they use similar strategies as those identified for supporters. Five strategies are explored: developing new ideas, building coalitions to sell ideas, using windows of opportunity, playing multiple venues and orchestrating networks. Using empirical evidence from Dutch and Hungarian water policy change, we discuss whether individuals pursued these strategies to support or oppose major policy change. Our analysis showed the significance of recognition of a new policy concept at an abstract level by responsible government actors, as well as their engagement with a credible regional coalition that can contextualise and advocate the concept regionally. The strategies of supporters were also used by opponents of water policy change. Opposition was inherent to policy change, and whether or not government actors sought to engage with opponents influenced the realisation of water policy change
Words are Malleable: Computing Semantic Shifts in Political and Media Discourse
Recently, researchers started to pay attention to the detection of temporal
shifts in the meaning of words. However, most (if not all) of these approaches
restricted their efforts to uncovering change over time, thus neglecting other
valuable dimensions such as social or political variability. We propose an
approach for detecting semantic shifts between different viewpoints--broadly
defined as a set of texts that share a specific metadata feature, which can be
a time-period, but also a social entity such as a political party. For each
viewpoint, we learn a semantic space in which each word is represented as a low
dimensional neural embedded vector. The challenge is to compare the meaning of
a word in one space to its meaning in another space and measure the size of the
semantic shifts. We compare the effectiveness of a measure based on optimal
transformations between the two spaces with a measure based on the similarity
of the neighbors of the word in the respective spaces. Our experiments
demonstrate that the combination of these two performs best. We show that the
semantic shifts not only occur over time, but also along different viewpoints
in a short period of time. For evaluation, we demonstrate how this approach
captures meaningful semantic shifts and can help improve other tasks such as
the contrastive viewpoint summarization and ideology detection (measured as
classification accuracy) in political texts. We also show that the two laws of
semantic change which were empirically shown to hold for temporal shifts also
hold for shifts across viewpoints. These laws state that frequent words are
less likely to shift meaning while words with many senses are more likely to do
so.Comment: In Proceedings of the 26th ACM International on Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017
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