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Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
Increasingly people form opinions based on information they consume on online social media. As a result, it is crucial to understand what type of content attracts people's attention on social media and drive discussions. In this paper we…
Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study…
Controversy is widespread online. Previous studies mainly define controversy based on vague assumptions of its relation to sentiment such as hate speech and offensive words. This paper introduces the first question-answering dataset that…
With the growing interest in social applications of Natural Language Processing and Computational Argumentation, a natural question is how controversial a given concept is. Prior works relied on Wikipedia's metadata and on content analysis…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
Which topics spark the most heated debates on social media? Identifying those topics is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also allows the filtering and aggregation of social media content for disseminating news…
As public discourse continues to move and grow online, conversations about divisive topics on social media platforms have also increased. These divisive topics prompt both contentious and non-contentious conversations. Although what…
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…
The utilization of social media material in journalistic workflows is increasing, demanding automated methods for the identification of mis- and disinformation. Since textual contradiction across social media posts can be a signal of…
The proliferation of social media platforms has afforded social scientists unprecedented access to vast troves of data on human interactions, facilitating the study of online behavior at an unparalleled scale. These platforms typically…
Bridging content that brings together individuals with opposing viewpoints on social media remains elusive, overshadowed by echo chambers and toxic exchanges. We propose that algorithmic curation could surface such content by considering…
Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing…
We propose a system to predict harmful discussions on social media platforms. Our solution uses contextual deep language models and proposes the novel idea of integrating state-of-the-art Graph Transformer Networks to analyze all…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
In this work, we ask two questions: 1. Can we predict the type of community interested in a news article using only features from the article content? and 2. How well do these models generalize over time? To answer these questions, we…
In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as…
How do news sources tackle controversial issues? In this work, we take a data-driven approach to understand how controversy interplays with emotional expression and biased language in the news. We begin by introducing a new dataset of…
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various…
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or…