Statistical Inferences for Polarity Identification in Natural Language

Information forms the basis for all human behavior, including the ubiquitous decision-making that people constantly perform in their every day lives. It is thus the mission of researchers to understand how humans process information to reach decisions. In order to facilitate this task, this work proposes a novel method of studying the reception of granular expressions in natural language. The approach utilizes LASSO regularization as a statistical tool to extract decisive words from textual content and draw statistical inferences based on the correspondence between the occurrences of words and an exogenous response variable. Accordingly, the method immediately suggests significant implications for social sciences and Information Systems research: everyone can now identify text segments and word choices that are statistically relevant to authors or readers and, based on this knowledge, test hypotheses from behavioral research. We demonstrate the contribution of our method by examining how authors communicate subjective information through narrative materials. This allows us to answer the question of which words to choose when communicating negative information. On the other hand, we show that investors trade not only upon facts in financial disclosures but are distracted by filler words and non-informative language. Practitioners - for example those in the fields of investor communications or marketing - can exploit our insights to enhance their writings based on the true perception of word choice

Community-Based Fact-Checking on Twitter's Birdwatch Platform

Misinformation undermines the credibility of social media and poses significant threats to modern societies. As a countermeasure, Twitter has recently introduced "Birdwatch," a community-driven approach to address misinformation on Twitter. On Birdwatch, users can identify tweets they believe are misleading, write notes that provide context to the tweet and rate the quality of other users' notes. In this work, we empirically analyze how users interact with this new feature. For this purpose, we collect {all} Birdwatch notes and ratings between the introduction of the feature in early 2021 and end of July 2021. We then map each Birdwatch note to the fact-checked tweet using Twitter's historical API. In addition, we use text mining methods to extract content characteristics from the text explanations in the Birdwatch notes (e.g., sentiment). Our empirical analysis yields the following main findings: (i) users more frequently file Birdwatch notes for misleading than not misleading tweets. These misleading tweets are primarily reported because of factual errors, lack of important context, or because they treat unverified claims as facts. (ii) Birdwatch notes are more helpful to other users if they link to trustworthy sources and if they embed a more positive sentiment. (iii) The social influence of the author of the source tweet is associated with differences in the level of user consensus. For influential users with many followers, Birdwatch notes yield a lower level of consensus among users and community-created fact checks are more likely to be seen as being incorrect and argumentative. Altogether, our findings can help social media platforms to formulate guidelines for users on how to write more helpful fact checks. At the same time, our analysis suggests that community-based fact-checking faces challenges regarding opinion speculation and polarization among the user base

Understanding the Role of Social Media in the Assessment of Retailer-Hosted Consumer Reviews

Agile methods incorporate many techniques that support coordination in co-located software development teams. However, these benefits do not necessarily transfer to a distributed context. Even though research on coordination in distributed agile software development is growing, there is limited rigorous research on its application in context. Further the extant literature is fragmented, with little cohesive building of cumulative knowledge on coordination in distributed agile software development. This study investigates the scientific evidence between 2006 and 2016 by conducting a systematic review of the literature on coordination in distributed agile software development. The search strategy resulted in 178 studies, of which 50 were identified as primary studies relevant to this research. The studies were classified using three high-level categories: (i) theoretical foundation and application, (ii) tools and techniques, and (iii) challenges. This study provides a structured overview of the current state of knowledge on coordination in distributed agile development, and identifies opportunities for future research

The Longer the Better? The Interplay Between Review Length and Line of Argumentation in Online Consumer Reviews

Review helpfulness serves as focal point in understanding customers’ purchase decision-making process on online retailer platforms. An overwhelming majority of previous works find longer reviews to be more helpful than short reviews. In this paper, we propose that longer reviews should not be assumed to be uniformly more helpful; instead, we argue that the effect depends on the line of argumentation in the review text. To test this idea, we use a large dataset of Amazon customer reviews in combination with a state-of-the-art approach from natural language processing that allows us to study the line of argumentation at sentence level. Our empirical analysis suggests that the frequency of argumentation changes moderates the effect of review length on helpfulness. Altogether, we disprove the prevailing narrative that longer reviews are uniformly perceived as more helpful. Retailer platforms can utilize our results to optimize their customer feedback system and to feature more useful reviews

Finding Qs: Profiling QAnon Supporters on Parler

The social media platform "Parler" has emerged into a prominent fringe community where a significant part of the user base are self-reported supporters of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of elites controls global politics. QAnon is considered to have had an influential role in the public discourse during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. However, little is known about QAnon supporters on Parler and what sets them aside from other users. Building up on social identity theory, we aim at profiling the characteristics of QAnon supporters on Parler. We analyze a large-scale dataset with more than 600,000 profiles of English-speaking users on Parler. Based on users' profiles, posts, and comments, we then extract a comprehensive set of user features, linguistic features, network features, and content features. This allows us to perform user profiling and understand to what extent these features discriminate between QAnon and non-QAnon supporters on Parler. Our analysis is three-fold: (1) We quantify the number of QAnon supporters on Parler, finding that 34,913 users (5.5% of all users) openly report to support the conspiracy. (2) We examine differences between QAnon vs. non-QAnon supporters. We find that QAnon supporters differ statistically significantly from non-QAnon supporters across multiple dimensions. For example, they have, on average, a larger number of followers, followees, and posts, and thus have a large impact on the Parler network. (3) We use machine learning to identify which user characteristics discriminate QAnon from non-QAnon supporters. We find that user features, linguistic features, network features, and content features, can - to a large extent - discriminate QAnon vs. non-QAnon supporters on Parler. In particular, we find that user features are highly discriminatory, followed by content features and linguistic features.Comment: Accepted at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM, 2023

Sentence-Level Sentiment Analysis of Financial News Using Distributed Text Representations and Multi-Instance Learning

Researchers and financial professionals require robust computerized tools that allow users to rapidly operationalize and assess the semantic textual content in financial news. However, existing methods commonly work at the document-level while deeper insights into the actual structure and the sentiment of individual sentences remain blurred. As a result, investors are required to apply the utmost attention and detailed, domain-specific knowledge in order to assess the information on a fine-grained basis. To facilitate this manual process, this paper proposes the use of distributed text representations and multi-instance learning to transfer information from the document-level to the sentence-level. Compared to alternative approaches, this method features superior predictive performance while preserving context and interpretability. Our analysis of a manually-labeled dataset yields a predictive accuracy of up to 69.90 %, exceeding the performance of alternative approaches by at least 3.80 percentage points. Accordingly, this study not only benefits investors with regard to their financial decision-making, but also helps companies to communicate their messages as intended

Is Human Information Processing Affected by Emotional Content? Understanding The Role of Facts and Emotions in the Stock Market

The Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) mandates stock-listed companies in the U.S. to file regulated disclosures that should allow investors to make an informed decision before exercising ownership in stock. We thus hypothesize that investors do not rely solely upon the essential facts but are also impaired by unconscious and idiosyncratic characteristics in their perception. In fact, such affective processing is suggested by behavioral finance and information processing theory, while empirical evidence in large-scale settings remains rare. As a remedy, this paper statistically locates decisive words in financial news that reflect the complete bandwidth of drivers behind investment decisions. According to our results, the decision-making of investors is significantly influenced by emotionally-charged content and non-informative wording