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As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g.,…
News website comment sections are spaces where potentially conflicting opinions and beliefs are voiced. Addressing questions of how to study such cultural and societal conflicts through technological means, the present article critically…
In an age characterized by the proliferation of mis- and disinformation online, it is critical to empower readers to understand the content they are reading. Important efforts in this direction rely on manual or automatic fact-checking,…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
Our day-to-day life has always been influenced by what people think. Ideas and opinions of others have always affected our own opinions. The explosion of Web 2.0 has led to increased activity in Podcasting, Blogging, Tagging, Contributing…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
Detecting persuasion in argumentative text is a challenging task with important implications for understanding human communication. This work investigates the role of persuasion strategies - such as Attack on reputation, Distraction, and…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
With the growth of social medias, such as Twitter, plenty of user-generated data emerge daily. The short texts published on Twitter -- the tweets -- have earned significant attention as a rich source of information to guide many…
To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
In machine learning, temporal shifts occur when there are differences between training and test splits in terms of time. For streaming data such as news or social media, models are commonly trained on a fixed corpus from a certain period of…
Recent years have witnessed the rise of misinformation campaigns that spread specific narratives on social media to manipulate public opinions on different areas, such as politics and healthcare. Consequently, an effective and efficient…
Opinion dynamics, the evolution of individuals through social interactions, is an important area of research with applications ranging from politics to marketing. Due to its interdisciplinary relevance, studies of opinion dynamics remain…
In the digital era, the rapid propagation of fake news and rumors via social networks brings notable societal challenges and impacts public opinion regulation. Traditional fake news modeling typically forecasts the general popularity trends…
Human biases have been shown to influence the performance of models and algorithms in various fields, including Natural Language Processing. While the study of this phenomenon is garnering focus in recent years, the available resources are…
Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
Data extracted from social media platforms, such as Twitter, are both large in scale and complex in nature, since they contain both unstructured text, as well as structured data, such as time stamps and interactions between users. A key…