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The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multi-agent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness.…
Even though it is unrealistic to expect citizens to pinpoint the policy implementation that they prefer from the set of alternatives, it is still possible to infer such information through an exercise of ranking the importance of policy…
Information and communication technology has the capability to improve the process by which governments involve citizens in formulating public policy and public projects. Even though much of government regulations may now be in digital form…
Recent discussions on alternative facts, fake news, and post truth politics have motivated research on creating technologies that allow people not only to access information, but also to assess the credibility of the information presented…
Identifying and communicating relationships between causes and effects is important for understanding our world, but is affected by language structure, cognitive and emotional biases, and the properties of the communication medium. Despite…
Social media play a key role in mobilizing collective action, holding the potential for studying the pathways that lead individuals to actively engage in addressing global challenges. However, quantitative research in this area has been…
As disinformation-driven cognitive attacks become increasingly sophisticated, the ability to quantify their impact is essential for advancing cybersecurity defense strategies. This paper presents a novel framework for measuring the…
Many real-world situations of ethical and economic relevance, such as collective (in)action with respect to the climate crisis, involve not only diverse agents whose decisions interact in complicated ways, but also various forms of…
The increasing digitization of political speech has opened the door to studying a new dimension of political behavior using text analysis. This work investigates the value of word-level statistical data from the US Congressional…
When humans judge the affective content of texts, they also implicitly assess the correctness of such judgment, that is, their confidence. We hypothesize that people's (in)confidence that they performed well in an annotation task leads to…
Wordscores is a popular quantitative text scaling method to estimate parties' positions on a priori specified dimensions, without requiring the researchers to read or even understand the language in the documents they are analysing. This…
Predicting how a user responds to news events enables important applications such as allowing intelligent agents or content producers to estimate the effect on different communities and revise unreleased messages to prevent unexpected bad…
Although social media provides a vibrant platform to discuss real-world events, the quantity of information generated can overwhelm decision making based on that information. By better understanding who is participating in information…
Social media have substantially altered the way brands and businesses advertise: Online Social Networks provide brands with more versatile and dynamic channels for advertisement than traditional media (e.g., TV and radio). Levels of…
This article proposes a new approach for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We measure the quality of an answer based on how easily and accurately it can be recognized in a random set of candidate…
Most recommendation engines today are based on predicting user engagement, e.g. predicting whether a user will click on an item or not. However, there is potentially a large gap between engagement signals and a desired notion of "value"…
Several messages express opinions about events, products, and services, political views or even their author's emotional state and mood. Sentiment analysis has been used in several applications including analysis of the repercussions of…
Methods and applications are inextricably linked in science, and in particular in the domain of text-as-data. In this paper, we examine one such text-as-data application, an established economic index that measures economic policy…
The connection between messaging and action is fundamental both to web applications, such as web search and sentiment analysis, and to economics. However, while prominent online applications exploit messaging in natural (human) language in…
The spread of misinformation through online social media platforms has had substantial societal consequences. As a result, platforms have introduced measures to alert users of news content that may be misleading or contain inaccuracies as a…