44,579 research outputs found
Computational Controversy
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by
fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have
been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently,
various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using
new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these
phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such
debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of
the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to
link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is
both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same
time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead
to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the
crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social
Informatics (SocInfo) 201
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Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach
Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist âapproaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolectâ (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ân-gram textbitesâ, small textual segments that characterise that authorâs writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material
The Prosecutor and the Press: Lessons (Not) Learned from the Mike Nifong Debacle
Current projections indicate that by 2050, two in every three people will live in urban
areas, and that cities will accommodate 3 billion people during this period. Cities are
consuming three-quarters of the world's energy and causing three-quarters of global
pollution. To reduce these impacts, new technologies have been considered in the
development of smart sustainable cities, but technology has not always favoured the idea
of sustainable consumption. To address this issue, we have aimed to focus on identifying
the role of sustainable consumption within implementations of smart citiesâ projects
across Europe.
We have selected a set of smart city projects in 76 cities in Europe from CONCERTO
initiatives, Mapping Smart Cities in Europe, Energy Study for the Stockholm Region and
Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas and classified them
according to: smart governance, smart mobility, smart living, smart environment, smart
citizens and smart economy. Furthermore, we established a number of categories for the
classification of the evaluated projects based on their relevance to sustainable
consumption, and considered several solutions for the integration of sustainable
consumption in smart sustainable cities.
The results show that in 18.9% of the projects, sustainable consumption is not relevant at
all. The second classification shows the percentage of the remaining categories where
sustainable consumption is relevant; 8.3% consider sustainable consumption as relevant
even though it was not implemented in the project. These cities aim to achieve a higher
level of sustainable consumption, which is expected to be included in future projects. If
they keep themselves in this category, their behavioural consumption patterns will not
change and the impact of citizens on the cities will remain the same. The majority of the
projects, 54.2%, implemented technology to reduce consumption but if the projects do
not coincide with the behaviour of citizens, a big rebound effect will occur. 37.5% of the
projects consider relevant sustainable consumption to its full potential and this can change
citizenâs behaviour.
In conclusion, sustainable consumption is relevant in most of the projects analysed, with
new technologies available to help energy savings and reduction of our consumption.
However, if there is a lack of smart consumption from the citizens, the technologies
available might not be sufficient and consumption could increase. One quarter of the
analysed smart cities projects still do not consider the consumption behaviour of the
citizens. This can be changed through campaigns and explanations targeting the
population on how to manage and reduce energy and resource consumption. To reduce
the negative impact of the citiesâ growth, projects considering smart sustainable cities
need to integrate sustainable consumption policies that account for citizens' behaviour
Online Misinformation: Challenges and Future Directions
Misinformation has become a common part of our digital media environments and it is compromising the ability of our societies to form informed opinions. It generates misperceptions, which have affected the decision making processes in many domains, including economy, health, environment, and elections, among others. Misinformation and its generation, propagation, impact, and management is being studied through a variety of lenses (computer science, social science, journalism, psychology, etc.) since it widely affects multiple aspects of society. In this paper we analyse the phenomenon of misinformation from a technological point of view.We study the current socio-technical advancements towards addressing the problem, identify some of the key limitations of current technologies, and propose some ideas to target such limitations. The goal of this position paper is to reflect on the current state of the art and to stimulate discussions on the future design and development of algorithms, methodologies, and applications
QUOTUS: The Structure of Political Media Coverage as Revealed by Quoting Patterns
Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets
need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience.
Outlets are often accused of exhibiting a systematic bias in this selection
process, with different outlets portraying different versions of reality.
However, in the absence of objective measures and empirical evidence, the
direction and extent of systematicity remains widely disputed.
In this paper we propose a framework based on quoting patterns for
quantifying and characterizing the degree to which media outlets exhibit
systematic bias. We apply this framework to a massive dataset of news articles
spanning the six years of Obama's presidency and all of his speeches, and
reveal that a systematic pattern does indeed emerge from the outlet's quoting
behavior. Moreover, we show that this pattern can be successfully exploited in
an unsupervised prediction setting, to determine which new quotes an outlet
will select to broadcast. By encoding bias patterns in a low-rank space we
provide an analysis of the structure of political media coverage. This reveals
a latent media bias space that aligns surprisingly well with political ideology
and outlet type. A linguistic analysis exposes striking differences across
these latent dimensions, showing how the different types of media outlets
portray different realities even when reporting on the same events. For
example, outlets mapped to the mainstream conservative side of the latent space
focus on quotes that portray a presidential persona disproportionately
characterized by negativity.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of WWW 2015. 11pp, 10 fig. Interactive
visualization, data, and other info available at
http://snap.stanford.edu/quotus
The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis
We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between
the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different
language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we
describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the
controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree
of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in
different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be
presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell
us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and practices of
peer-production. Our results indicate that Wikipedia is more than just an
encyclopaedia; it is also a window into convergent and divergent social-spatial
priorities, interests and preferences.Comment: This is a draft of a book chapter to be published in 2014 by
Scarecrow Press. Please cite as: Yasseri T., Spoerri A., Graham M., and
Kert\'esz J., The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and
geographical analysis. In: Fichman P., Hara N., editors, Global
Wikipedia:International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration.
Scarecrow Press (2014
When Technology Makes Headlines: The Media's Double Vision About the Digital Age
Analyzes technology-related news items appearing in lead sections of mainstream media for trends in popular topics, companies, and messages about technology's influence and its risks. Compares findings with trends in new media such as blogs and Twitter
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