Related papers: Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements i…

Though current researches often study the properties of online social relationship from an objective view, we also need to understand individuals' subjective opinions on their interrelationships in social computing studies. Inspired by the…

Assessing uncertainty is an important step towards ensuring the safety and reliability of machine learning systems. Existing uncertainty estimation techniques may fail when their modeling assumptions are not met, e.g. when the data…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but often struggle to align with human preferences, leading to harmful or undesirable outputs. Preference learning, which trains models to distinguish between preferred…

Our interpretation of value concepts is shaped by our sociocultural background and lived experiences, and is thus subjective. Recognizing individual value interpretations is important for developing AI systems that can align with diverse…

In Recommender System (RS), explanations help users understand why items are recommended and can enhance a system's transparency, persuasiveness, engagement, and trust, which are known as explanation goals. However, evaluating the…

We investigate the novel task of online dispute detection and propose a sentiment analysis solution to the problem: we aim to identify the sequence of sentence-level sentiments expressed during a discussion and to use them as features in a…

The proliferation of personalized recommendation technologies has raised concerns about discrepancies in their recommendation performance across different genders, age groups, and racial or ethnic populations. This varying degree of…

Socio-psychological studies have identified a common phenomenon where an individual's public actions do not necessarily coincide with their private opinions, yet most existing models fail to capture the dynamic interplay between these two…

An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less…

Offline evaluations of recommender systems attempt to estimate users' satisfaction with recommendations using static data from prior user interactions. These evaluations provide researchers and developers with first approximations of the…

The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…

Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among…

Statistical methods applied to social media posts shed light on the dynamics of online dialogue. For example, users' wording choices predict their persuasiveness and users adopt the language patterns of other dialogue participants. In this…

AI-based virtual assistants are increasingly used to support daily ideation tasks. The values or bias present in these agents can influence output in hidden ways. They may also affect how people perceive the ideas produced with these AI…

Consensus formation and difference of opinion have long been the subject of research. However, relevant laws and systems within society are being updated to reflect the changes in information networks. Online environment has come to fulfill…

We consider the problem of collaborative personalized mean estimation under a privacy constraint in an environment of several agents continuously receiving data according to arbitrary unknown agent-specific distributions. In particular, we…

When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…

Opinion dynamics concerns social processes through which populations or groups of individuals agree or disagree on specific issues. As such, modelling opinion dynamics represents an important research area that has been progressively…

We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…

We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model…