3 research outputs found
He votes or she votes? Female and male discursive strategies in Twitter political hashtags
In this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and
male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service
Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag designation process
during political debate. The fact that men and women use language in
distinct ways, reverberating practices linked to their expected roles in
the social groups, is a linguistic phenomenon known to happen in
several cultures and that can now be studied on the Web and on online
social networks in a large scale enabled by computing power. Here, for
instance, after analyzing tweets with political content posted during
Brazilian presidential campaign, we found out that male Twitter users,
when expressing their attitude toward a given candidate, are more prone
to use imperative verbal forms in hashtags, while female users tend to
employ declarative forms. This difference can be interpreted as a sign
of distinct approaches in relation to other network members: for
example, if political hashtags are seen as strategies of persuasion in
Twitter, imperative tags could be understood as more overt ways of
persuading and declarative tags as more indirect ones. Our findings help
to understand human gendered behavior in social networks and contribute
to research on the new fields of computer-enabled Internet linguistics
and social computing, besides being useful for several computational
tasks such as developing tag recommendation systems based on users'
collective preferences and tailoring targeted advertising strategies,
among others.FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac
Automatic classification of written descriptions by healthy adults: An overview of the application of natural language processing and machine learning techniques to clinical discourse analysis
Discourse production is an important aspect in the evaluation of brain-injured individuals. We believe that studies comparing the performance of brain-injured subjects with that of healthy controls must use groups with compatible education. A pioneering application of machine learning methods using Brazilian Portuguese for clinical purposes is described, highlighting education as an important variable in the Brazilian scenario. Objective: The aims were to describe how to:(i) develop machine learning classifiers using features generated by natural language processing tools to distinguish descriptions produced by healthy individuals into classes based on their years of education; and(ii) automatically identify the features that best distinguish the groups. Methods: The approach proposed here extracts linguistic features automatically from the written descriptions with the aid of two Natural Language Processing tools: Coh-Metrix-Port and AIC. It also includes nine task-specific features (three new ones, two extracted manually, besides description time; type of scene described - simple or complex; presentation order - which type of picture was described first; and age). In this study, the descriptions by 144 of the subjects studied in Toledo18 were used,which included 200 healthy Brazilians of both genders. Results and Conclusion: A Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel is the most recommended approach for the binary classification of our data, classifying three of the four initial classes. CfsSubsetEval (CFS) is a strong candidate to replace manual feature selection methods