Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media

Ankita Bhaumik, Ning Sa, Gregorios Katsios, Tomek Strzalkowski


Abstract
Social media platforms are popular tools for disseminating targeted information during major public events like elections or pandemics. Systematic analysis of the message traffic can provide valuable insights into prevailing opinions and social dynamics among different segments of the population. We are specifically interested in influence spread, and in particular whether more deliberate influence operations can be detected. However, filtering out the essential messages with telltale influence indicators from the extensive and often chaotic social media traffic is a major challenge.In this paper we present a novel approach to extract influence indicators from messages circulating among groups of users discussing particular topics. We build upon the the concept of a convo to identify influential authors who are actively promoting some particular agenda around that topic within the group. We focus on two influence indicators: the (control of) agenda and the use of emotional language.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1303
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14984–14994
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1303
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ankita Bhaumik, Ning Sa, Gregorios Katsios, and Tomek Strzalkowski. 2024. Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14984–14994, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media (Bhaumik et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1303.pdf