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Metaphors are widely used in political rhetoric as an effective framing device. While the efficacy of specific metaphors such as the war metaphor in political discourse has been documented before, those studies often rely on small number of…

Metaphors are powerful framing devices, yet their source domains alone do not fully explain the specific associations they evoke. We argue that the interplay between source domains and semantic frames determines how metaphors shape…

The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating…

In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study…

The rise of right-wing populism in Europe has brought to the forefront the significance of analysing social media discourse to understand the dissemination of extremist ideologies and their impact on political outcomes. Twitter, as a…

How has the public responded to the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies? We investigate public perceptions of AI by collecting over 12,000 responses over 12 months from a nationally representative U.S.…

Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for scalable analysis of online discourse. Yet their use in multilingual social science research remains constrained by model size, cost and linguistic bias. We develop a lightweight,…

Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…

Polarization has increased substantially in political discourse, contributing to a widening partisan divide. In this paper, we analyzed large-scale, real-world language use in Reddit communities (294,476,146 comments) and in news outlets…

Visual metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices used to persuade or communicate creative ideas through images. Similar to linguistic metaphors, they convey meaning implicitly through symbolism and juxtaposition of the symbols. We propose a…

Superdiversity refers to large cultural diversity in a population due to immigration. In this paper, we introduce a superdiversity index based on the changes in the emotional content of words used by a multi-cultural community, compared to…

Metonymy and metaphor often co-occur in natural language, yet computational work has studied them largely in isolation. We introduce a framework that transforms a literal sentence into three figurative variants: metonymic, metaphoric, and…

Large language models (LLMs) are often described as multilingual because they can understand and respond in many languages. However, speaking a language is not the same as reasoning within a culture. This distinction motivates a critical…

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…

Streaming social media provides a real-time glimpse of extreme weather impacts. However, the volume of streaming data makes mining information a challenge for emergency managers, policy makers, and disciplinary scientists. Here we explore…

When a news article describes immigration as an "economic burden" or a "humanitarian crisis," it selectively emphasizes certain aspects of the issue. Although \textit{framing} shapes how the public interprets such issues, audiences do not…

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the…

Immigration is one of the most salient topics in public debate. Social media heavily influences opinions on immigration, often sparking polarized debates and offline tensions. Studying 220,870 immigration-related tweets in the UK, we…

Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…

Generating metaphors is a challenging task as it requires a proper understanding of abstract concepts, making connections between unrelated concepts, and deviating from the literal meaning. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric…