Related papers: Quantifying Voter Biases in Online Platforms: An I…
One main challenge in social media is to identify trustworthy information. If we cannot recognize information as trustworthy, that information may become useless or be lost. Opposite, we could consume wrong or fake information with major…
The use of instrumental variables for estimating the effect of an exposure on an outcome is popular in econometrics, and increasingly so in epidemiology. This increasing popularity may be attributed to the natural occurrence of instrumental…
Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Under the standard IV model, however, the average treatment effect (ATE) is only partially identifiable. To address this,…
Instrumental variable methods have been widely used to identify causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. A key identification condition known as the exclusion restriction states that the instrument cannot have a direct…
In recent years, critics of online platforms have raised concerns about the ability of recommendation algorithms to amplify problematic content, with potentially radicalizing consequences. However, attempts to evaluate the effect of…
Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithms usually lacks transparency, motivating…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Instrumental variable methods provide useful tools for inferring causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To apply these methods with large-scale data sets, a major challenge is to find valid instruments from a possibly…
Users on the internet usually require venues to provide better purchasing recommendations. This can be provided by a reputation system that processes ratings to provide recommendations. The rating aggregation process is a main part of…
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining has become an open research domain after proliferation of Internet and Web 2.0 social media. People express their attitudes and opinions on social media including blogs, discussion forums, tweets, etc.…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…
Opinionated users often seek information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence due to confirmation bias. This conduct hinders their ability to consider alternative stances when searching the web.…
Social media platforms increasingly rely on crowdsourced moderation systems like Community Notes to combat misinformation at scale. However, these systems face challenges from rater bias and potential manipulation, which may undermine their…
In the Internet era the information overload and the challenge to detect quality content has raised the issue of how to rank both resources and users in online communities. In this paper we develop a general ranking method that can…
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups,…
Living in the 'Information Age' means that not only access to information has become easier but also that the distribution of information is more dynamic than ever. Through a large-scale online field experiment, we provide new empirical…
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification. Instead of using user-generated ratings or annotations provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs…
The widespread use of online review sites over the past decade has motivated businesses of all types to possess an expansive arsenal of user feedback to mark their reputation. Though a significant proportion of purchasing decisions are…
In this paper, we propose a variational approach to unsupervised sentiment analysis. Instead of using ground truth provided by domain experts, we use target-opinion word pairs as a supervision signal. For example, in a document snippet "the…