Linguistic Threat Assessment: Understanding Targeted Violence through Computational Linguistics

Language alluding to possible violence is widespread online, and security professionals are increasingly faced with the issue of understanding and mitigating this phenomenon. The volume of extremist and violent online data presents a workload that is unmanageable for traditional, manual threat assessment. Computational linguistics may be of particular relevance to understanding threats of grievance-fuelled targeted violence on a large scale. This thesis seeks to advance knowledge on the possibilities and pitfalls of threat assessment through automated linguistic analysis. Based on in-depth interviews with expert threat assessment practitioners, three areas of language are identified which can be leveraged for automation of threat assessment, namely, linguistic content, style, and trajectories. Implementations of each area are demonstrated in three subsequent quantitative chapters. First, linguistic content is utilised to develop the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary aimed at measuring concepts related to grievance-fuelled violence in text. Thereafter, linguistic content is supplemented with measures of linguistic style in order to examine the feasibility of author profiling (determining gender, age, and personality) in abusive texts. Lastly, linguistic trajectories are measured over time in order to assess the effect of an external event on an extremist movement. Collectively, the chapters in this thesis demonstrate that linguistic automation of threat assessment is indeed possible. The concluding chapter describes the limitations of the proposed approaches and illustrates where future potential lies to improve automated linguistic threat assessment. Ideally, developers of computational implementations for threat assessment strive for explainability and transparency. Furthermore, it is argued that computational linguistics holds particular promise for large-scale measurement of grievance-fuelled language, but is perhaps less suited to prediction of actual violent behaviour. Lastly, researchers and practitioners involved in threat assessment are urged to collaboratively and critically evaluate novel computational tools which may emerge in the future

A Systematic Literature Review on Cyberbullying in Social Media: Taxonomy, Detection Approaches, Datasets, And Future Research Directions

In the area of Natural Language Processing, sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, aims to extract human thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions from unstructured texts. In the light of social media's rapid growth and the influx of individual comments, reviews and feedback, it has evolved as an attractive, challenging research area. It is one of the most common problems in social media to find toxic textual content.  Anonymity and concealment of identity are common on the Internet for people coming from a wide range of diversity of cultures and beliefs. Having freedom of speech, anonymity, and inadequate social media regulations make cyber toxic environment and cyberbullying significant issues, which require a system of automatic detection and prevention. As far as this is concerned, diverse research is taking place based on different approaches and languages, but a comprehensive analysis to examine them from all angles is lacking. This systematic literature review is therefore conducted with the aim of surveying the research and studies done to date on classification of  cyberbullying based in textual modality by the research community. It states the definition, , taxonomy, properties, outcome of cyberbullying, roles in cyberbullying  along with other forms of bullying and different offensive behavior in social media. This article also shows the latest popular benchmark datasets on cyberbullying, along with their number of classes (Binary/Multiple), reviewing the state-of-the-art methods to detect cyberbullying and abusive content on social media and discuss the factors that drive offenders to indulge in offensive activity, preventive actions to avoid online toxicity, and various cyber laws in different countries. Finally, we identify and discuss the challenges, solutions, additionally future research directions that serve as a reference to overcome cyberbullying in social media

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Two sides to every tweet: Exploring the framing, predictors, and associated consequences of online shaming

Online shaming, whereby individuals call out real or perceived wrongdoings online, has become an ever-increasing, global form of social policing. Despite the negative consequences associated with this phenomenon, most existing discussion and debate is anecdotal and media-based, with current understandings largely non-empirical, theoretical, and overall scarce. The overarching aim of this thesis was to explore the framing, predictors, and associated consequences of online shaming, which was achieved via a mixed-methods research project comprising four studies

“Keep It 100”: A Handbook Promoting Equitable Outcomes for Black University Students Through Mentorship

Black and racialized students attend Canadian universities with the intent of achieving academic success. However, instances of overt and covert racism negatively impact Black and racialized students’ academic success and retention rates in university programs. Lee (1999) and Sinanan (2016) suggest mentorship as a key strategy towards increasing academic success and retention rates among Black students. This handbook proposes mentorship strategies for use by university educators and administrators to help build beneficial relationships with Black and racialized students that lead to improved learning outcomes. Specifically, this handbook proposes what Quach et al. (2020) have identified as mentee-focused mentorship. Mentee-focused mentorship centres on the needs of Black students and recognizes the layers of systemic racism that exist in universities. This project provides educators and administrators with an understanding of concepts related to systemic racism, anti-racism, intersectionality, critical race theory (CRT) and CRT-informed practices. Personal stories from Black students collected from the academic literature are presented alongside points of reflection for educators and administrators. Points of reflection are provided with the intent that readers will meaningfully consider their positions of power and the strengths in students’ non-academic identities

An Examination of Parental Transmission on Young Voters’ Political Party Affiliation, Parenting Style Mediations

This paper examines the relationship of parental transmission and young voter’s political affiliation by examining parental and offsprings’ political affiliations within the United States. Correlations between both maternal and paternal political affiliations with offspring political affiliations were significant. Paternal types of authoritative and permissive parenting acted as mediators of parental transmission. Examining literature from psychological, political science, historical, and sociological tests, the thesis explores how young voters’ develop their political affiliations. Suggestions from the text emphasize the importance of examining voters’ identities, historical events, and the priorities of the generation to understand young voters’ political behavior

Policing “Fake” femininity:Authenticity, accountability, and influencer antifandom

Although social media influencers enjoy a coveted status position in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and—more pointedly—networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs”—forums for anti-fandom often dismissed as frivolous gossip or, alternatively, denigrated as conduits for cyberbullying and misogyny. This article draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMIBLOG), to show instead how influencer hateblogs are discursive sites of gendered authenticity policing. Findings reveal that GOMI participants wage patterned accusations of duplicity across three domains where women influencers seemingly “have it all”: career, relationships, and appearance. But while antifans’ policing of “fake” femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level—rather than structural—inequities

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Echoes: Digital Political Discourse and Vectors of Ideological Propagation

This study analyzes the discursive strategies used by participants in online non-political spaces to negotiate and propagate political ideologies. Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis in rhetorical studies (Huckin et. al.), this study produced a theory of political ideological vectors in digitally connective social network platforms. The analysis uses discussions taken from Twitter and Reddit surrounding the introduction of an Asian female character, Nagini, in the Fantastic Beats: Crimes of Grindelwald trailer immediately following its release in September 2018. Ultimately, this study found that participants are less likely to isolate themselves within politically congenial echo chambers than previously theorized (Iyengar & Hahn). Additionally, the study found that discursive language patterns including using personally diminishing language in conjunction with referencing false or un-confirmed premises fostered high levels of engagement, while high or intellectual registers and overly emotional language were rejected by the community and met little or no success due to communally agreed upon social norms and lexis

VIRALITY OF MALAY LANGUAGE POSTINGS ON FACEBOOK: AN ANALYSIS ON CONTENT AND LINGUISTICS ATTRIBUTES

The increasing use of Facebook among users from different walks of life has made it one of the main sources of information. The extra attention given to these Facebook posts has created a phenomenon known as “virality” in which a post can be shared to hundred thousand of users within a short time, way faster than the mainstream media. While previous studies have investigated viral postings from the perspective of business and mostly in English posts, this study aims to linguistically analyse the Malay language postings on Facebook that causes them to be viral in terms of content and linguistics attributes. Using textual analysis of 100 Facebook postings from various topics that went viral with a corpus size of about 10,000 words, this study captured the content and language attributes of each post and tabulate them accordingly. The results showed that the main content attribute of viral postings is largely related to family-related advices while the most common linguistic features are the use of personal pronouns as well as high occurrences of adjectives. In terms of writing styles, it was found that arguments/debate and anecdote are the most popular. The findings from this study have provided valuable input to social media marketers in creating content that would reach out to more users. Future research, however, can increase the scope of viral postings by increasing the number of sample and also correlate with other demographic factors

Providing Diverse Texts to Secondary Learners: Encouraging Critical Inquiry and Understanding

The goal of this action research project was to become a more competent educator when it comes to incorporating diverse literature in my classroom, and facilitate conversations about race, gender, and power among my students. A contributing factor to the ability to critically think is the capacity to read and reflect. Nationally, at least 8.7 million low-income students in kindergarten through fifth grade read below grade level. Research shows that income is closely tied to literacy rates (Van Pelt, 2018). By helping students connect texts to their own lives and critically analyze them, teachers are setting students up for success in the workplace, but also in their interpersonal relationships and daily lives. The methods of inquiry for this study focused on the principles and practices of action research, using self-study aligned with professional teaching standards, teacher artifacts, journal entries, classroom artifacts, lesson plans, and EDTPA materials as a means of data collection. I used these methods to address three research questions: (1) How can I encourage students to analyze texts through application to personal and social contexts?; (2) How can I develop pedagogical skills to engage students in discussions about race and power?; and (3) How do I develop a library that reflects critical literacy practices? Major themes that emerged from my research were self-study, expert recommendation, and student choice. In order to improve my disposition and ability to lead discussions about race and power, I need the background knowledge and practice to be prepared for those discussions