Related papers: Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing socia…

Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people's access to mobile…

Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…

We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years…

Social media platforms are rife with politically charged discussions. Therefore, accurately deciphering and predicting partisan biases using Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly critical. In this study, we address the challenge of…

Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…

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…

Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of recent papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word…

With the growth of social media usage, social activists try to leverage this platform to raise the awareness related to a social issue and engage the public worldwide. The broad use of social media platforms in recent years, made it easier…

Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the…

This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…

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…

Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use…

Twitter is one of the most popular social media. Due to the ease of availability of data, Twitter is used significantly for research purposes. Twitter is known to evolve in many aspects from what it was at its birth; nevertheless, how it…

Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and…

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…

Due to the worldwide accessibility to the Internet along with the continuous advances in mobile technologies, physical and digital worlds have become completely blended, and the proliferation of social media platforms has taken a leading…

Polarization and echo chambers are often studied in the context of explicitly political events such as elections, and little scholarship has examined the mixing of political groups in non-political contexts. A major obstacle to studying…

The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…

Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…

Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…