Issue Framing in Online Discussion Fora

In online discussion fora, speakers often make arguments for or against something, say birth control, by highlighting certain aspects of the topic. In social science, this is referred to as issue framing. In this paper, we introduce a new issue frame annotated corpus of online discussions. We explore to what extent models trained to detect issue frames in newswire and social media can be transferred to the domain of discussion fora, using a combination of multi-task and adversarial training, assuming only unlabeled training data in the target domain.Comment: To appear in NAACL-HLT 201

People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities

Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by inaccuracies and misinformation. In this work we propose a method for automatically establishing the credibility of user-generated medical statements and the trustworthiness of their authors by exploiting linguistic cues and distant supervision from expert sources. To this end we introduce a probabilistic graphical model that jointly learns user trustworthiness, statement credibility, and language objectivity. We apply this methodology to the task of extracting rare or unknown side-effects of medical drugs --- this being one of the problems where large scale non-expert data has the potential to complement expert medical knowledge. We show that our method can reliably extract side-effects and filter out false statements, while identifying trustworthy users that are likely to contribute valuable medical information

A study of feature exraction techniques for classifying topics and sentiments from news posts

Recently, many news channels have their own Facebook pages in which news posts have been released in a daily basis. Consequently, these news posts contain temporal opinions about social events that may change over time due to external factors as well as may use as a monitor to the significant events happened around the world. As a result, many text mining researches have been conducted in the area of Temporal Sentiment Analysis, which one of its most challenging tasks is to detect and extract the key features from news posts that arrive continuously overtime. However, extracting these features is a challenging task due to post’s complex properties, also posts about a specific topic may grow or vanish overtime leading in producing imbalanced datasets. Thus, this study has developed a comparative analysis on feature extraction Techniques which has examined various feature extraction techniques (TF-IDF, TF, BTO, IG, Chi-square) with three different n-gram features (Unigram, Bigram, Trigram), and using SVM as a classifier. The aim of this study is to discover the optimal Feature Extraction Technique (FET) that could achieve optimum accuracy results for both topic and sentiment classification. Accordingly, this analysis is conducted on three news channels’ datasets. The experimental results for topic classification have shown that Chi-square with unigram have proven to be the best FET compared to other techniques. Furthermore, to overcome the problem of imbalanced data, this study has combined the best FET with OverSampling technology. The evaluation results have shown an improvement in classifier’s performance and has achieved a higher accuracy at 93.37%, 92.89%, and 91.92 for BBC, Al-Arabiya, and Al-Jazeera, respectively, compared to what have been obtained on original datasets. Similarly, same combination (Chi-square+Unigram) has been used for sentiment classification and obtained accuracies at rates of 81.87%, 70.01%, 77.36%. However, testing the recognized optimal FET on unseen randomly selected news posts has shown a relatively very low accuracies for both topic and sentiment classification due to the changes of topics and sentiments over time

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Comparing Intentions and Perceptions in Online Discussions

Discourse involves two perspectives: a person's intention in making an utterance and others' perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as misunderstandings, low productivity and even overt strife. In this work, we present a computational framework for exploring and comparing both perspectives in online public discussions. We combine logged data about public comments on Facebook with a survey of over 16,000 people about their intentions in writing these comments or about their perceptions of comments that others had written. Unlike previous studies of online discussions that have largely relied on third-party labels to quantify properties such as sentiment and subjectivity, our approach also directly captures what the speakers actually intended when writing their comments. In particular, our analysis focuses on judgments of whether a comment is stating a fact or an opinion, since these concepts were shown to be often confused. We show that intentions and perceptions diverge in consequential ways. People are more likely to perceive opinions than to intend them, and linguistic cues that signal how an utterance is intended can differ from those that signal how it will be perceived. Further, this misalignment between intentions and perceptions can be linked to the future health of a conversation: when a comment whose author intended to share a fact is misperceived as sharing an opinion, the subsequent conversation is more likely to derail into uncivil behavior than when the comment is perceived as intended. Altogether, these findings may inform the design of discussion platforms that better promote positive interactions.Comment: Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW) 202

Detecting Comments on News Articles in Microblogs

A reader of a news article would often be interested in the comments of other readers on an article, because comments give insight into popular opinions or feelings toward a given piece of news. In recent years, social media platforms, such as Twitter, have become a social hub for users to communicate and express their thoughts. This includes sharing news articles and commenting on them. In this paper, we propose an approach for identifying “comment-tweets” that comment on news articles. We discuss the nature of comment-tweets and compare them to subjective tweets. We utilize a machine learning-based classification approach for distinguishing between comment-tweets and others that only report the news. Our approach is evaluated on the TREC-2011 Microblog track data after applying additional annotations to tweets containing comments. Results show the effectiveness of our classification approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on live news articles