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Online comments play a crucial role in shaping public sentiment and opinion dynamics on social media. However, evaluating their popularity remains challenging, not only because it depends on linguistic quality, originality, and emotional…
Research on conspiracy theories has largely focused on belief formation, exposure, and diffusion, while paying less attention to how their meanings change over time. This gap persists partly because conspiracy-related terms are often…
Online Social Communities (OSCs) provide a medium for connecting people, sharing news, eliciting information, and finding jobs, among others. The dynamics of the interaction among the members of OSCs is not always growth dynamics. Instead,…
Group interactions take place within a particular socio-temporal context, which should be taken into account when modelling interactions in online communities. We propose a method for jointly modelling community structure and language over…
This study quantitatively analyzes the structural characteristics of user communities within Social Virtual Reality (Social VR) platforms supporting head-mounted displays (HMDs), based on large-scale log data. By detecting and evaluating…
Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as…
A significant share of political discourse occurs online on social media platforms. Policymakers and researchers try to understand the role of social media design in shaping the quality of political discourse around the globe. In the past…
Personal values have significant influence on individuals' behaviors, preferences, and decision making. It is therefore not a surprise that personal values of a person could influence his or her social media content and activities. Instead…
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Twitter to disseminate safety guidance and updates, reaching millions of users. This study analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC…
Online support communities have become vital spaces offering varied forms of support to individuals facing mental health challenges. Despite the proliferation of platforms with distinct technical structures, little is known about how these…
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…
Understanding and predicting the emotional trajectory in multi-party multi-turn conversations is of great significance. Such information can be used, for example, to generate empathetic response in human-machine interaction or to inform…
Most research of online communication focuses on modes of communication that are either open (like forums, bulletin boards, Twitter, etc.) or direct (like e-mails). In this work, we study a dataset that has both types of communication…
Social media platforms are like giant arenas where users can rely on different content and express their opinions through likes, comments, and shares. However, do users welcome different perspectives or only listen to their preferred…
Social Media provides researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into various facets of human life. Health practitioners put a great emphasis on pinpointing socioeconomic status (SES) of individuals as they can use to it…
State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce…
As the online world continues its exponential growth, interpersonal communication has come to play an increasingly central role in opinion formation and change. In order to help users better engage with each other online, we study a…
Extensive research has examined presence and basic psychological needs (drawing on Self-Determination Theory) in digital media. While prior work offers hints of potential connections, we lack a systematic account of whether and how distinct…
Although analyzing user behavior within individual communities is an active and rich research domain, people usually interact with multiple communities both on- and off-line. How do users act in such multi-community environments? Although…
Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…