39,816 research outputs found
How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations
We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify
discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data
from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very
uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic
roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of
question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very
much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion
dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two
different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model
outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using
platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word
relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively
to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions.
Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn
discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed,
with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism
enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to
their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil
important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our
text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous
non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play
their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook
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
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
Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion
Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating
in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that
social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than
traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or
less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may
resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others.
We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables
interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an
under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief
change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and
agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.Comment: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(EACL 2017
Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue
Research on the structure of dialogue has been hampered for years because
large dialogue corpora have not been available. This has impacted the dialogue
research community's ability to develop better theories, as well as good off
the shelf tools for dialogue processing. Happily, an increasing amount of
information and opinion exchange occur in natural dialogue in online forums,
where people share their opinions about a vast range of topics. In particular
we are interested in rejection in dialogue, also called disagreement and
denial, where the size of available dialogue corpora, for the first time,
offers an opportunity to empirically test theoretical accounts of the
expression and inference of rejection in dialogue. In this paper, we test
whether topic-independent features motivated by theoretical predictions can be
used to recognize rejection in online forums in a topic independent way. Our
results show that our theoretically motivated features achieve 66% accuracy, an
improvement over a unigram baseline of an absolute 6%.Comment: @inproceedings{Misra2013TopicII, title={Topic Independent
Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue},
author={Amita Misra and Marilyn A. Walker}, booktitle={SIGDIAL Conference},
year={2013}
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