On the Identification of Emotions and Authors' Gender in Facebook Comments on the Basis of their Writing Style

[EN] In this paper, we propose a method for automatic identifying emotions in written texts in social media with high proliferation such as Facebook. For that task we try to model the way people use the language to express themselves, and also use this model for identifying the gender of the authors. We focused on Spanish due to the lack of studies and resources in that language.The work of the first author was partially funded by Autoritas Consulting SA and by Ministerio de Econom´ıa de Espa˜na under grant ECOPORTUNITY IPT-2012-1220-430000. The work of the second author was carried out in the framework of the WIQ-EI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, the DIANA APPLICATIONS Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) project and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Rangel, F.; Rosso, P. (2013). On the Identification of Emotions and Authors' Gender in Facebook Comments on the Basis of their Writing Style. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 1096:34-46. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/38110S3446109

'R.I.P. man...u are missed and loved by many': entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest in Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the intextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Communicating emotions online : the function of anonymity and gender

The electronic media directly or indirectly encourage their users to take an active role online. This, among others, finds its reflection on the users’ expression of opinions in public about various issues. The degree of freedom of expression and sharing the users’ opinions and emotions with others will depend on a number of factors, the major one, as it is assumed here, being the users’ degree of anonymity. An important role, as some previous studies have shown, is also to be assigned to the gender of the post authors. The following study will therefore attempt to investigate the issue of the frequency and the character of emotions expressed in the posts written in English, excerpted from three types of media: anonymous, represented by the International Movie Data Base; semi-anonymous, where both real names and invented ones may appear (film fan pages available on Facebook); to opinions expressed by Facebook friends in a more private online interaction. The objective will be to establish both the character and the rate of expressed emotions (positive or negative ones) and the degree of the users’ openness about their feelings, depending on the medium of expression and their gender, where disclosed

Youth and intimate media cultures: gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire as storytelling practices in social networking sites

This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect how audiences and SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity, bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate

Author Profiling in Social Media: The Impact of Emotions on Discourse Analysis

[EN] In this paper we summarise the content of the keynote that will be given at the 5th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP) in Le Mans, France in October 23¿25, 2017. In the keynote we will address the importance of inferring demographic information for marketing and security reasons. The aim is to model how language is shared in gender and age groups taking into account its statistical usage. We will see how a shallow discourse analysis can be done on the basis of a graph-based representation in order to extract information such as how complicated the discourse is (i.e., how connected the graph is), how much interconnected grammatical categories are, how far a grammatical category is from others, how different grammatical categories are related to each other, how the discourse is modelled in different structural or stylistic units, what are the grammatical categories with the most central use in the discourse of a demographic group, what are the most common connectors in the linguistic structures used, etc. Moreover, we will see also the importance to consider emotions in the shallow discourse analysis and the impact that this has. We carried out some experiments for identifying gender and age, both in Spanish and in English, using PAN-AP-13 and PAN-PC-14 corpora, obtaining comparable results to the best performing systems of the PAN Lab at CLEF.The research work described in this paper was partially carried out in the framework of the SomEMBED project (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO).Rosso, P.; Rangel-Pardo, FM. (2017). Author Profiling in Social Media: The Impact of Emotions on Discourse Analysis. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 10583:3-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_1S31810583Blondel, V.D., Guillaume, J.L., Lambiotte, R., Lefebvre, E.: Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. 2008(10), 10008 (2008)Bonacich, P.: Factoring and weighting approaches to clique identification. J. Math. Soc. 2(1), 113–120 (1972)Brandes, U.: A faster algorithm for betweenness centrality. J. Math. 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Psychol. 54, 547–577 (2003)Pennebaker, J.W.: The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. Bloomsbury Press, London (2011)Rangel, F., Hernández, I., Rosso, P., Reyes, A.: Emotions and irony per gender in Facebook. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Emotion, Social Signals, Sentiment & Linked Open Data (ES3LOD), LREC-2014, Reykjavik, Iceland, 26–31 May 2014, pp. 68–73 (2014)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013. In: Forner et al. [7]Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Chugur, I., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Halvey, M., Kraaij, W. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2014 LABs and Workshops, vol. 1180, pp. 951–957. CEUR-WS.org (2014)Rangel, F., Rosso, P.: On the multilingual and genre robustness of EmoGraphs for author profiling in social media. 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“R.I.P. man…u are missed and loved by many”: entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest In Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the entextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Film adaptation for knowing audiences: analysing fan on-line responses to the end of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Critics of film adaptations of literary works have historically evaluated the success or failure of the movie on the grounds of its fidelity to the original book. In contrast popular arguments for medium specificity have questioned whether fidelity is possible when adapting one medium to another. This article follows recent academic work which has focused awareness on the processes of adaptation by examining evidence of reading and viewing experience in online and social media forums.      The broader research project explored the online Twilight fan community as an example of a ‘knowing audience’ acquainted with both novel and film. Here we focus on the strong response within fan forums to the surprise ending of the final film adaptation Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012). The research uses the forum, blog and facebook page as sites for evidence of reading experience as defined by the Reading Experience Database (RED). The analysis sheds new light on the tensions that exist between fidelity and deviation and the article positions fan audiences as intensive readers who gained unexpected pleasure from a deviation from a canon. It argues that fans are also collaborators within the adaptation process who respect authorial authority and discuss the author’s, scriptwriter’s and director’s interpretation of the novel for the screen. The research identifies the creative and commercial advantages to be gained from a collaborative and open dialogue between adaptors and fans.  Keywords: Adaptation, fandom, online fan communities, Twilight, reading experience, film, audiences, fidelity, canon, collaboration, screenwriting, franchise, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg, Bill Condo

Social Identity Enactment Through Linguistic Style: Using Naturally Occurring Online Data to Study Behavioural Prototypicality

Social identity prototypes refer to the quintessential representation of a particular social identity; prototypes define and prescribe the characteristics, behaviours and attitudes of a particular group, as distinguished from other groups (Hogg, 2001). For the most part, identity prototypicality is studied using self-reported methods used to assess perceptions of the prototypicality of self and others. However, in this thesis we provide behavioural evidence to demonstrate how linguistic style data can be used to measure identity-prototypical behaviour in real world contexts. Combining naturally-occurring online data with experimental data, the first chapter demonstrates that individuals behave in an identity-prototypical way regardless of the context in which they are communicating. Further, we show that this identity-prototypical style of communication is robust to topic, demographics, personality and platform, and moreover that the same identity-prototypical communication style can be detected in experimentally controlled conditions. In the second chapter, we demonstrate the small but statistically significant link between identity-prototypical communication and influence in real-world forum data. This finding provides insight into how group members respond to other ingroup members based on their prototypical communication style in real-world situations. Finally, in the third chapter, we use the group prototypical behaviour observed in naturally occurring online forum data to construct a typology of social identities, demonstrating the existence of five different types of social identity in line with the research of Deaux et al. (1995). We also demonstrate that it is possible to use this measurement of behavioural prototypicality to observe identity change over time. Using eight years’ worth of forum data, we illustrate the slow movement of the transgender identity from being a stigmatised identity in 2012, to shifting towards a collective action identity in 2019. In sum, the findings outlined in this thesis provide evidence to support the idea that it is possible to use machine learning algorithms and naturally occurring online data to study behavioural prototypicality in real world environments. Moreover, this methodology enables us to study identities ‘in the wild’ thus transcending the limitations associated with using self-reported methodologies or experimental approaches to study how individuals express and enact their group memberships. Further, we also demonstrate the value in using naturally-occurring online behavioural data to test and extend the key components of social identity theory.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Approaches to automated detection of cyberbullying:A Survey

Research into cyberbullying detection has increased in recent years, due in part to the proliferation of cyberbullying across social media and its detrimental effect on young people. A growing body of work is emerging on automated approaches to cyberbullying detection. These approaches utilise machine learning and natural language processing techniques to identify the characteristics of a cyberbullying exchange and automatically detect cyberbullying by matching textual data to the identified traits. In this paper, we present a systematic review of published research (as identified via Scopus, ACM and IEEE Xplore bibliographic databases) on cyberbullying detection approaches. On the basis of our extensive literature review, we categorise existing approaches into 4 main classes, namely; supervised learning, lexicon based, rule based and mixed-initiative approaches. Supervised learning-based approaches typically use classifiers such as SVM and Naïve Bayes to develop predictive models for cyberbullying detection. Lexicon based systems utilise word lists and use the presence of words within the lists to detect cyberbullying. Rules-based approaches match text to predefined rules to identify bullying and mixed-initiatives approaches combine human-based reasoning with one or more of the aforementioned approaches. We found lack of quality representative labelled datasets and non-holistic consideration of cyberbullying by researchers when developing detection systems are two key challenges facing cyberbullying detection research. This paper essentially maps out the state-of-the-art in cyberbullying detection research and serves as a resource for researchers to determine where to best direct their future research efforts in this field