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The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort,…
Which topics spark the most heated debates on social media? Identifying those topics is not only interesting from a societal point of view, but also allows the filtering and aggregation of social media content for disseminating news…
Counterspeech can be an effective method for battling hateful content on social media. Automated counterspeech generation can aid in this process. Generated counterspeech, however, can be viable only when grounded in the context of topic,…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
The detection of controversial content in political discussions on the Internet is a critical challenge in maintaining healthy digital discourse. Unlike much of the existing literature that relies on synthetically balanced data, our work…
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various…
Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study…
Vast amounts of human communication occurs online. These digital traces of natural human communication along with recent advances in natural language processing technology provide for computational analysis of these discussions. In the…
Argument mining and stance detection are central to understanding how opinions are formed and contested in online discourse. However, most publicly available resources focus on mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, leaving…
Controversial content refers to any content that attracts both positive and negative feedback. Its automatic identification, especially on social media, is a challenging task as it should be done on a large number of continuously evolving…
Online users discuss and converse about all sorts of topics on social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are among many other networks where users can have this freedom of information sharing. The abundance of information shared over these…
We propose a system to predict harmful discussions on social media platforms. Our solution uses contextual deep language models and proposes the novel idea of integrating state-of-the-art Graph Transformer Networks to analyze all…
Society is often polarized by controversial issues, that split the population into groups of opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of 'echo chambers', i.e., situations where like-minded…
The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement. While debunking efforts aim to counteract misinformation and foster fact-based dialogue,…
Modeling user engagement dynamics on social media has compelling applications in user-persona detection and political discourse mining. Most existing approaches depend heavily on knowledge of the underlying user network. However, a large…
Social media (i.e., Reddit) users are overloaded with people's opinions when viewing discourses about divisive topics. Traditional user interfaces in such media present those opinions in a linear structure, which can limit users in viewing…
Real-world data analysis tasks often come with under-specified goals and unclean data. User interaction is necessary to understand and disambiguate a user's intent, and hence, essential to solving these complex tasks. Existing benchmarks…
In this work, we present a novel quantification of conflict in online discussion. Unlike previous studies on conflict dynamics, which model conflict as a binary phenomenon, our measure is continuous-valued, which we validate with manually…
Social Media has seen a tremendous growth in the last decade and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. With such adoption, it is increasingly becoming a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The detection and…