A study on text-score disagreement in online reviews

In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa); and 2) detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts. To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with around 160k hotel reviews collected from Tripadvisor, with the aim of detecting a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in line, or not, with the associated score. Using well established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score, we find that -on a scale of five stars- those reviews ranked with middle scores include a mixture of positive and negative aspects. The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an effective selection of reviews -on an initial very large dataset- that may allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset featuring a text/score disagreement, which conveniently convey to the user a summary of positive and negative features of the review target.Comment: This is the accepted version of the paper. The final version will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Computation, available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12559-017-9496-

Beyond the culture effect on credibility perception on microblogs

We investigated the credibility perception of tweet readers from the USA and by readers from eight Arabic countries; our aim was to understand if credibility was affected by country and/or by culture. Results from a crowd-sourcing experiment, showed a wide variety of factors affected credibility perception, including a tweet author's gender, profile image, username style, location, and social network overlap with the reader. We found that culture determines readers' credibility perception, but country has no effect. We discuss the implications of our findings for user interface design and social media systems

Citizen Science 2.0 : Data Management Principles to Harness the Power of the Crowd

Citizen science refers to voluntary participation by the general public in scientific endeavors. Although citizen science has a long tradition, the rise of online communities and user-generated web content has the potential to greatly expand its scope and contributions. Citizens spread across a large area will collect more information than an individual researcher can. Because citizen scientists tend to make observations about areas they know well, data are likely to be very detailed. Although the potential for engaging citizen scientists is extensive, there are challenges as well. In this paper we consider one such challenge – creating an environment in which non-experts in a scientific domain can provide appropriate and accurate data regarding their observations. We describe the problem in the context of a research project that includes the development of a website to collect citizen-generated data on the distribution of plants and animals in a geographic region. We propose an approach that can improve the quantity and quality of data collected in such projects by organizing data using instance-based data structures. Potential implications of this approach are discussed and plans for future research to validate the design are described

Computational fact checking from knowledge networks

Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of dubious information. Here we show that the complexities of human fact checking can be approximated quite well by finding the shortest path between concept nodes under properly defined semantic proximity metrics on knowledge graphs. Framed as a network problem this approach is feasible with efficient computational techniques. We evaluate this approach by examining tens of thousands of claims related to history, entertainment, geography, and biographical information using a public knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia. Statements independently known to be true consistently receive higher support via our method than do false ones. These findings represent a significant step toward scalable computational fact-checking methods that may one day mitigate the spread of harmful misinformation

Social Media, Professional Media, and Mobilization in Contemporary Britain:Explaining the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Citizens’ Movement 38 Degrees

This article was published in the journal Political Studies [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716631350Digital media continue to reshape political activism in unexpected ways. Within a period of a few years, the internet-enabled UK citizens’ movement 38 Degrees has amassed a membership of 3 million and now sits alongside similar entities such as America’s MoveOn, Australia’s GetUp! and the transnational movement Avaaz. In this article, we contribute to current thinking about digital media and mobilisation by addressing some of the limitations of existing research on these movements and on digital activism more generally. We show how 38 Degrees’ digital network repertoires coexist interdependently with its strategy of gaining professional news media coverage. We explain how the oscillations between choreographic leadership and member influence and between digital media horizontalism and elite media-centric work constitute the space of interdependencies in which 38 Degrees acts. These delicately balanced relations can quickly dissolve and be replaced by simpler relations of dependence on professional media. Yet despite its fragility, we theorise about how 38 Degrees may boost individuals’ political efficacy, irrespective of the outcome of individual campaigns. Our conceptual framework can be used to guide research on similar movements

Development of Trust in an Online Breast Cancer Forum: A Qualitative Study

Background: Online health forums provide peer support for a range of medical conditions, including life-threatening and terminal illnesses. Trust is an important component of peer-to-peer support, although relatively little is known about how trust forms within online health forums. Objective: The aim of this paper is to examine how trust develops and influences sharing among users of an online breast cancer forum. Methods: An interpretive qualitative approach was adopted. Data were collected from forum posts from 135 threads on nine boards on the UK charity, Breast Cancer Care (BCC). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 BCC forum users. Both datasets were analysed thematically using Braun and Clarke’s [2006] approach and combined to triangulate analysis. Results: Trust operates in three dimensions, structural, relational and temporal, which intersect with each other and do not operate in isolation. The structural dimension relates to how the affordances and formal rules of the site affected trust. The relational dimension refers to how trust was necessarily experienced in interactions with other forum users: it emerged within relationships and was a social phenomenon. The temporal dimension relates to how trust changed over time and was influenced by the length of time users spent on the forum. Conclusions: Trust is a process that changes over time, and which is influenced by structural features of the forum and informal but collectively understood relational interactions among forum users. The study provides a better understanding of how the intersecting structural, relational and temporal aspects that support the development of trust facilitate sharing in online environments. These findings will help organisations developing online health forums

Discovery and integration of Web 2.0 content into geospatial information infrastructures: a use case in wild fire monitoring

Efficient environment monitoring has become a major concern for society to guarantee sustainable development. For instance, forest fire detection and analysis is important to provide early warning systems and identify impact. In this environmental context, availability of up-to-date information is very important for reducing damages caused. Environmental applications are deployed on top of GeospatialInformation Infrastructures (GIIs) to manage information pertaining to our environment. Suchinfrastructures are traditionally top-down infrastructures that do not consider user participation. This provokes a bottleneck in content publication and therefore a lack of content availability. On the contrary mainstream IT systems and in particular the emerging Web 2.0 Services allow active user participation that is becoming a massive source of dynamic geospatial resources. In this paper, we present a webservice, that implements a standard interface, offers a unique entry point for spatial data discovery, both in GII services and web 2.0 services. We introduce a prototype as proof of concept in a forest fire scenario, where we illustrate how to leverage scientific data and web 2.0 conten