Related papers: Characterizing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Co…
Misinformation entails the dissemination of falsehoods that leads to the slow fracturing of society via decreased trust in democratic processes, institutions, and science. The public has grown aware of the role of social media as a…
We study the changes of opinions about vaccination together with the evolution of a disease. In our model we consider a multiplex network consisting of two layers. One of the layers corresponds to a social network where people share their…
Polarization is often a clich{\'e}, its conceptualization remains approximate and no consensus has been reached so far. Often simply seen as an inevitable result of the use of social networks, polarization nevertheless remains a complex…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global concern. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. User…
Recent advances in text mining and natural language processing technology have enabled researchers to detect an authors identity or demographic characteristics, such as age and gender, in several text genres by automatically analysing the…
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as #instantlyinlove?…
Machine learning methods are increasingly applied to analyze health-related public discourse based on large-scale data, but questions remain regarding their ability to accurately detect different types of health sentiments. Especially,…
In the last decade, social media has evolved as one of the leading platform to create, share, or exchange information; it is commonly used as a way for individuals to maintain social connections. In this online digital world, people use to…
Variation in language is ubiquitous, particularly in newer forms of writing such as social media. Fortunately, variation is not random, it is often linked to social properties of the author. In this paper, we show how to exploit social…
The massive popularity of online social media provides a unique opportunity for researchers to study the linguistic characteristics and patterns of user's interactions. In this paper, we provide an in-depth characterization of language…
There exists an invisible barrier between healthcare professionals' perception of a patient's clinical experience and the reality. This barrier may be induced by the environment that hinders patients from sharing their experiences openly…
Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet…
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join polarized…
We introduce WhaVax, a new expert-annotated dataset of vaccine-related WhatsApp messages collected from large Brazilian public groups spanning multiple pandemic years. The dataset was constructed through a rigorous, carefully designed…
Communication on social media platforms is not only culturally and politically relevant, it is also increasingly widespread across societies. Users not only communicate via social media platforms, but also search specifically for…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
The explosive growth of social media has not only revolutionized communication but also brought challenges such as political polarization, misinformation, hate speech, and echo chambers. This dissertation employs computational social…
Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation are significant barriers to achieving widespread vaccination coverage. Smaller public health departments may lack the expertise or resources to craft effective vaccine messaging. This paper explores the…
False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of…