English

Empirical Study on Detecting Controversy in Social Media

Social and Information Networks 2019-09-15 v1 Computation and Language Information Retrieval Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Companies and financial investors are paying increasing attention to social consciousness in developing their corporate strategies and making investment decisions to support a sustainable economy for the future. Public discussion on incidents and events -- controversies -- of companies can provide valuable insights on how well the company operates with regards to social consciousness and indicate the company's overall operational capability. However, there are challenges in evaluating the degree of a company's social consciousness and environmental sustainability due to the lack of systematic data. We introduce a system that utilizes Twitter data to detect and monitor controversial events and show their impact on market volatility. In our study, controversial events are identified from clustered tweets that share the same 5W terms and sentiment polarities of these clusters. Credible news links inside the event tweets are used to validate the truth of the event. A case study on the Starbucks Philadelphia arrests shows that this method can provide the desired functionality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.01093,
  title  = {Empirical Study on Detecting Controversy in Social Media},
  author = {Azadeh Nematzadeh and Grace Bang and Xiaomo Liu and Zhiqiang Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.01093},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

The work is accepted by the 2nd KDD Workshop on Anomaly Detection in Finance, 2019. The authors contributed equally to this work, listed in the alphabetical order