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Understanding the sociodemographic composition of online platforms is essential for accurately interpreting digital behavior and its societal implications. Yet, current methods often lack the transparency and reliability required, risking…
We present a survey of methods for assessing and enhancing the quality of online discussions, focusing on the potential of LLMs. While online discourses aim, at least in theory, to foster mutual understanding, they often devolve into…
A community needs assessment is a tool used by non-profits and government agencies to quantify the strengths and issues of a community, allowing them to allocate their resources better. Such approaches are transitioning towards leveraging…
Millions of people express themselves on public social media, such as Twitter. Through their posts, these people may reveal themselves as potentially valuable sources of information. For example, real-time information about an event might…
Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…
Agents that negotiate with humans find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. Most efforts in human-agent negotiations rely on restrictive menu-driven interfaces for communication. To advance the research in language-based…
Popularity of content in social media is unequally distributed, with some items receiving a disproportionate share of attention from users. Predicting which newly-submitted items will become popular is critically important for both hosts of…
In our world with full of uncertainty, debates and argumentation contribute to the progress of science and society. Despite of the increasing attention to characterize human arguments, most progress made so far focus on the debate outcome,…
On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on…
The exponential increase in the use of the Internet and social media over the last two decades has changed human interaction. This has led to many positive outcomes, but at the same time it has brought risks and harms. While the volume of…
Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. However, news grounded conversation has long been stymied by the lack of well-designed task definition and scarce data. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Proactive…
Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
We analyze gendered communities defined in three different ways: text, users, and sentiment. Differences across these representations reveal facets of communities' distinctive identities, such as social group, topic, and attitudes. Two…
Modelling the complex dynamics of online social platforms is critical for addressing challenges such as hate speech and misinformation. While Discussion Transformers, which model conversations as graph structures, have emerged as a…
Opinion leaders are ubiquitous in both online and offline social networks, but the impacts of opinion leaders on social behavior contagions are still not fully understood, especially by using a mathematical model. Here we generalize the…
An-ever increasing number of social media websites, electronic newspapers and Internet forums allow visitors to leave comments for others to read and interact. This exchange is not free from participants with malicious intentions, which do…
People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…
This paper focuses on the recommendation of events in the Social Web, and addresses the problem of finding if, and to which extent, certain features, which are peculiar to events, are relevant in predicting the users' interests and should…
Multi-participant discussions tend to unfold in a tree structure rather than a chain structure. Branching may occur for multiple reasons -- from the asynchronous nature of online platforms to a conscious decision by an interlocutor to…