United States

While the contagious nature of online toxicity sparked increasing interest in early detection and prevention of it, most of the previous studies focus on the Western world. In this work, we study toxicity triggers in an online community for discussing issues regarding Singapore and conduct a comparative study of toxicity triggers between Singapore and New York City.

ICWSM 2022

Understanding Toxicity Triggers on Reddit in the Context of Singapore

toxicity trigger

online toxicity

reddit

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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

poster

Bias in news reporting can lead to tribalism and division on important issues. Scalable and reliable measurement of such biases is an important first step in addressing them. In this work, based on the intuition that media bias is captured by the tone and word choices in articles, we propose a framework for modeling the relative bias of media outlets through masked token prediction via large-scale pretrained masked language models fine-tuned on articles form news outlets. Through experiments on five diverse and politically polarized topics we show that our framework can capture media bias towards these topics with high reliability. Additionally, our experiments show that our framework is general, in that language models fine-tuned on one topic can be applied to other topics with little drop in performance.

Measuring Media Bias via Masked Language Modeling

The word embedding association test (WEAT) is an important method for measuring linguistic biases against social groups such as ethnic minorities in large text corpora. It does so by comparing the semantic relatedness of words prototypical of the groups (e.g., names unique to those groups) and attribute words (e.g., ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ words). We show that anti-black WEAT estimates from geo-tagged social media data at the level of metropolitan statistical areas strongly correlate with several measures of racial animus—even when controlling for sociodemographic covariates. However, we also show that every one of these correlations is explained by a third variable: the frequency of Black names in the underlying corpora relative to White names. This occurs because word embeddings tend to group positive (negative) words and frequent (rare) words together in the estimated semantic space. As the frequency of Black names on social media is strongly correlated with Black Americans’ prevalence in the population, this results in spurious anti-Black WEAT estimates wherever few Black Americans live. This suggests that research using the WEAT to measure bias should consider term frequency, and also demonstrates the potential consequences of using black-box models like word embeddings to study human cognition and behavior.

Negative Associations in Word Embeddings Predict anti-Black Bias Across Regions--but only via Name Frequency

On Twitter, so-called verified accounts represent celebrities and organizations of public interest, selected by Twitter based on criteria for both activity and notability. Our work seeks to understand the involvement and influence of these accounts in patterns of self-disclosure, namely, voluntary sharing of personal information. In a study of 3 million COVID-19 related tweets, we present a comparison of self-disclosure in verified vs ordinary users. We discuss evidence of peer effects on self-disclosing behaviors and analyze topics of conversation associated with these practices.

The contribution of verified accounts to self-disclosure in COVID-related Twitter conversations

Hate speech has proliferated on social media platforms in recent years. While this has been the focus of many studies, most works have exclusively focused on a single language, generally English. Low-resourced languages have been neglected due to the dearth of labeled resources. These languages, however represent an important portion of the data due to the multilingual nature of social media. This work presents a novel zero-shot, cross-lingual transfer learning pipeline based on pseudo-label fine-tuning of Transformer Language Models for automatic hate speech detection. We employ our pipeline on benchmark datasets covering English (source) and 6 different non-English (target) languages written in 3 different scripts. Our pipeline achieves an average improvement of 7.6% (in terms of macro-F1) over previous zero-shot, cross-lingual models. This demonstrates the feasibility of high accuracy automatic hate speech detection for low-resource languages. We release our code and models at https://github.com/<redacted>.

Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection with pseudo-label fine-tuning of Transformer Language Models

A conversation corpus is essential to build interactive AI applications. 
However, participants' demographic information is relatively understudied mainly due to a lack of individual data. 
In this work, we analyzed a  Korean nationwide daily conversation corpus constructed by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) to characterize the participation of different demographic groups in the corpus.

Who is Missing? Characterizing Participation of Different Demographic Groups in a Korean Nationwide Daily Conversation Corpus

We introduce the Reddit Politosphere, a large-scale resource of online political discourse covering more than 600 political discussion groups over a period of 12 years. It is to the best of our knowledge the largest and ideologically most comprehensive dataset of its type now available. One key feature of the Reddit Politosphere is that it consists of both text and network data, allowing for methodologically-diverse analyses. We describe in detail how we create the Reddit Politosphere, present descriptive statistics, and sketch potential directions for future research based on the resource.

The Reddit Politosphere: A Large-Scale Text and Network Resource of Online Political Discourse

A collection of over 3000 pages of emails sent by Anthony Fauci and his staff were released in an effort to understand the United States government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe how the original PDF document of emails was translated into a resource consisting of json files that make many future studies easy. We include examples for how to convert this email information into a network, a hypergraph, a temporal sequence, and a tensor for subsequent analysis, and discuss use cases and benefits in analyzing the data in these different derived formats. These resources are broadly useful for future research and pedagogical uses in terms of human and system behavioral interactions.

Fauci-email: a json Digest of Anthony Fauci's Released Emails

Currently, publicly available models for website classification do not offer an embedding method and have limited support for languages beyond English. We release a dataset with more than 1M websites in 92 languages with relative labels collected from Curlie, the largest multilingual crowdsourced Web directory. The dataset contains 14 website categories aligned across languages. Alongside it, we introduce Homepage2Vec, a machine-learned pre-trained model for classifying and embedding websites based on their homepage in a language-agnostic way. Homepage2Vec, thanks to its feature set (textual content, metadata tags, and visual attributes) and recent progress in natural language representation, is language-independent by design and can generate embeddings representation. We show that Homepage2Vec correctly classifies websites with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.90, with stable performance across low- as well as high-resource languages. Feature analysis shows that a small subset of efficiently computable features suffices to achieve high performance even with limited computational resources. 
We make publicly available the curated Curlie dataset aligned across languages, the pre-trained Homepage2Vec model, and libraries.

Language-Agnostic Website Embedding and Classification

Despite the increasing limitations for unvaccinated people, in many European countries there is still a non-negligible fraction of individuals who refuse to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, undermining governmental efforts to eradicate the virus. We study the role of online social media in influencing individuals' opinion towards getting vaccinated by designing a large-scale collection of Twitter messages in three different languages -- French, German, Italian -- and providing public access to the data collected. Focusing on the European context, our VaccinEU dataset aims to help researchers to better understand the impact of online (mis)information about vaccines and design more accurate communication strategies to maximize vaccination coverage.

VaccinEU: COVID-19 vaccine conversations on Twitter in French, German and Italian

This paper proposes a large-scale and comprehensive dataset of 28 sub-datasets of state-backed tweets and accounts affiliated with 14 different countries, spanning more than 3 years, and a corresponding "negative" dataset of background tweets from the same time period and on similar topics. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that contains both state-sponsored propaganda tweets and carefully collected corresponding negative tweet datasets for so many countries spanning such a long period of time.

Understanding Toxicity Triggers on Reddit in the Context of Singapore

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