Exploring Text Virality in Social Networks

This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being spread, rather than to the influencers who spread it, (b) virality is a phenomenon with many facets, i.e. under this generic term several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised and they only partially overlap. To give ground to our claims, we provide initial experiments in a machine learning framework to show how various aspects of virality can be independently predicted according to content features

Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion

Exploring Image Virality in Google Plus

Reactions to posts in an online social network show different dynamics depending on several textual features of the corresponding content. Do similar dynamics exist when images are posted? Exploiting a novel dataset of posts, gathered from the most popular Google+ users, we try to give an answer to such a question. We describe several virality phenomena that emerge when taking into account visual characteristics of images (such as orientation, mean saturation, etc.). We also provide hypotheses and potential explanations for the dynamics behind them, and include cases for which common-sense expectations do not hold true in our experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. IEEE/ASE SocialCom 201

Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?

Reactions to textual content posted in an online social network show different dynamics depending on the linguistic style and readability of the submitted content. Do similar dynamics exist for responses to scientific articles? Our intuition, supported by previous research, suggests that the success of a scientific article depends on its content, rather than on its linguistic style. In this article, we examine a corpus of scientific abstracts and three forms of associated reactions: article downloads, citations, and bookmarks. Through a class-based psycholinguistic analysis and readability indices tests, we show that certain stylistic and readability features of abstracts clearly concur in determining the success and viral capability of a scientific article.Comment: Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012), 4-8 June 2012, Dublin, Irelan

Ecological Evaluation of Persuasive Messages Using Google AdWords

In recent years there has been a growing interest in crowdsourcing methodologies to be used in experimental research for NLP tasks. In particular, evaluation of systems and theories about persuasion is difficult to accommodate within existing frameworks. In this paper we present a new cheap and fast methodology that allows fast experiment building and evaluation with fully-automated analysis at a low cost. The central idea is exploiting existing commercial tools for advertising on the web, such as Google AdWords, to measure message impact in an ecological setting. The paper includes a description of the approach, tips for how to use AdWords for scientific research, and results of pilot experiments on the impact of affective text variations which confirm the effectiveness of the approach.Comment: To appear at ACL 2012. 9 pages, 2 figure

Diritti e responsabilità nelle catene di appalti labour-intensive.

Il passaggio dalla fabbrica fordista ai modelli di organizzazione d'impresa più flessibili propri del postfordismo ha portato alla frammentazione della dimensione del potere all'interno dell’impresa. Questo ha comportato una dissociazione tra il soggetto detentore del potere direttivo e il soggetto organizzatore dei fattori di produzione. Operando sul piano della responsabilità, la scomparsa di questa identità ha compromesso i tradizionali strumenti protettivi dei lavoratori subordinati, basati sulla presunta relazione biunivoca datore-prestatore di lavoro, in quanto la fabbrica fordista rappresentava il luogo, non solo fisico, bensì anche giuridico in cui si realizzavano le relazioni di potere e dove i diritti dei lavoratori potevano essere difesi e attuati. Attraverso, in particolare, il prisma degli appalti labour-intensive, la tesi si propone di indagare le ripercussioni derivanti dalla rideterminazione dei confini dell'impresa sui diritti dei lavoratori subordinati coinvolti nei processi di esternalizzazione, allo scopo di fornire le basi per una riflessione in merito ai possibili strumenti per rafforzare l’effettività dei diritti in questo nuovo contesto. Il primo capitolo ripercorre le radici teoriche, di stampo economicistico, alla base del postfordismo e prova a indagare i limiti di una loro mera trasposizione sul piano giuridico, ponendo particolare attenzione alle relazioni di potere – riconducibili al potere organizzativo – che, pur consentendo all’impresa esternalizzante di ricercare nel mercato i fattori di produzione (tra cui il lavoro), le consentono, tuttavia, di mantenere su di essi un elevato livello di controllo. Dopo aver approfondito il precedente regime della L. n. 1369/1960, il secondo capitolo offre un’analisi delle scelte adottate dal legislatore, soprattutto con il D.Lgs. n. 276/2003, per adattare il sistema giuridico alle profonde trasformazioni organizzative vissute dall’impresa, approfondendo, in particolare, il problema degli appalti c.d. labour intensive, i quali, delineando un fenomeno economico-giuridico a cavallo tra la somministrazione e l’appalto, sollevano numerose questioni interpretative in merito alla tenuta del sistema delle tutele riconosciute ai lavoratori coinvolti. Attraverso un dialogo con la letteratura sociologica, il terzo capitolo sposta l’attenzione verso un’osservazione empirica del fenomeno e cerca di indagare, nell’ambito degli appalti, se la prassi economica e i rapporti di forza tra i vari soggetti coinvolti abbiano preso una strada diversa rispetto a quella immaginata dagli schemi regolatori approntati dal legislatore della riforma. Al termine di tale processo, vengono formulate alcune considerazioni riguardo alla condizione a cui è soggetto il lavoratore subordinato in appalto e alla reale giustiziabilità dei diritti derivanti dal rapporto di lavoro se calati all’interno di un’ambientazione non più in grado di garantire il pieno funzionamento degli strumenti pur predisposti a loro tutela. Calando queste conclusioni nella riflessione sul ruolo tradizionalmente giocato dalla distribuzione del rischio d'impresa tra datore di lavoro/imprenditore e lavoratore all'interno del rapporto di lavoro ,e in armonia con le crescenti spinte verso la giuridicizzazione della responsabilità d’impresa, il contributo si conclude esplorando le possibilità offerte dalle due diverse tecniche di tutela della due diligence e della responsabilità oggettiva, con l'obiettivo di valutarne i vantaggi e le criticità per affrontare il problema specifico della disarticolazione dell’impresa sul piano interno.The transition from the Fordist factory to the more flexible business organisation models of post-Fordism has led to the fragmentation of the power dimension within the enterprise. This has resulted in a dissociation between the subject holding managerial power and the subject organising the factors of production. Operating on the level of responsibility, the disappearance of this identity compromised the traditional protective instruments of employees, based on the presumed two-way employer-employee relationship, since the Fordist factory represented the place, not only physical but also legal, where power relations were realised and where workers' rights could be defended and implemented. Through, in particular, the prism of labour-intensive subcontracting chains, the thesis proposes to investigate the repercussions deriving from the redetermination of the boundaries of the enterprise on the rights of employees involved in outsourcing processes, in order to provide the basis for a reflection on the possible instruments to strengthen the effectiveness of rights in this new context. The first chapter retraces the economicist theoretical roots at the basis of post-Fordism and tries to investigate the limits of their mere transposition to the legal level, paying particular attention to the power relations - ascribable to organisational power - that, while allowing the outsourcing enterprise to search the market for factors of production (including labour), nevertheless allow it to maintain a high level of control over them. After analysing the previous regime of Law no. 1369/1960, the second chapter offers an analysis of the choices adopted by the legislature, especially with Legislative Decree no. 276/2003, to adapt the legal system to the profound organisational transformations experienced by the enterprise, delving in particular into the problem of labour-intensive subcontracting chains, which, outlining an economic-legal phenomenon straddling the borderline between agency work and subcontracting, raise numerous interpretative questions regarding the maintenance of the system of protection recognised for the workers involved. Through a dialogue with the sociological literature, the third chapter shifts the focus towards an empirical observation of the phenomenon and attempts to investigate, in the context of subcontracting, whether economic practice and the power relations between the various actors involved have taken a different path from the one imagined by the regulatory schemes prepared by the reform legislature. At the end of this process, a number of considerations are formulated regarding the condition to which the contract worker is subject and the real justiciability of the rights deriving from the employment relationship if dropped within a setting no longer capable of guaranteeing the full functioning of the instruments that are nonetheless predisposed to their protection. Setting these conclusions in the reflection on the role traditionally played by the distribution of business risk between employer/entrepreneur and worker within the employment relationship, and in harmony with the growing thrust towards the legalisation of corporate social responsibility, the contribution concludes by exploring the possibilities offered by the two different protection techniques of due diligence and strict liability, with the aim of assessing their advantages and criticalities in order to address the specific problem of the disarticulation of the enterprise on an internal level