Related papers: Widescope - A social platform for serious conversa…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
A recent rise in online content expressing concerns with public health initiatives has contributed to already stalled uptake of preemptive measures globally. Future public health efforts must attempt to understand such content, what…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Philosophical accounts of persuasion often assume that shared evidence and rational argumentation should lead to a convergence of views between peers, yet everyday discourse often suggests otherwise. In this study, we use large language…
Research collaborations are continuously emerging catalyzed by online platforms, where people can share their codes, calculations, data and results. These virtual research platforms are innovative, community oriented, flexible and secure as…
As online platforms and recommendation algorithms evolve, people are increasingly trapped in echo chambers, leading to biased understandings of various issues. To combat this issue, we have introduced PerSphere, a benchmark designed to…
A powerful means to help users discover new content in the overwhelming amount of information available today is sharing in online communities such as social networks or crowdsourced platforms. This means comes short in the case of what we…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
Veracity of data posted on the microblog platforms has in recent years been a subject of intensive study by professionals specializing in various fields of informatics as well as sociology, particularly in the light of increasing importance…
The entertainment-driven nature of social media encourages users to engage with like-minded individuals and consume content aligned with their beliefs, limiting exposure to diverse perspectives. Simultaneously, users migrate between…
Recent advances in text summarization have predominantly leveraged large language models to generate concise summaries. However, language models often do not maintain long-term discourse structure, especially in news articles, where…
Among the topics discussed on social media, some spark more heated debate than others. For example, experience suggests that major political events, such as a vote for healthcare law in the US, would spark more debate between opposing sides…
Social media serves as a primary communication and information dissemination platform for major global events, entertainment, and niche or topically focused community discussions. Therefore, it represents a valuable resource for researchers…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
Data exploration systems that provide differential privacy must manage a privacy budget that measures the amount of privacy lost across multiple queries. One effective strategy to manage the privacy budget is to compute a one-time private…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
Terms like 'misinformation', 'fake news', and 'echo chambers' permeate current discussions on the state of the Internet. We believe a lack of technological support to evaluate, contest, and reason about information online---as opposed to…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a…
Opinion summarisation synthesises opinions expressed in a group of documents discussing the same topic to produce a single summary. Recent work has looked at opinion summarisation of clusters of social media posts. Such posts are noisy and…