Social Media Commons^™

The Feelit System: Application Content-Aware Perspectives And Challenges On Understanding User Likes In Social Network Posts, Konstantinos Theocharidis, Hady W. Lauw, Panagiotis Karras

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a series of our prior works, we study influence and subscription maximization problems in social networks that are based on posts having influential content; as content we consider a set of features where each feature corresponds to a specific social network page, whereas influence and subscription relate to gaining the postlike and subscription-to-brand page of targeted users, respectively; subscription is conceptually achieved as repetitive influence on users. So, both influence and subscription depend on content that gains the likes of users; however, to be realistic, modeling and estimating such likes is a complex problem that has not been adequately …

Empowering Crisis Information Extraction Through Actionability Event Schemata And Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the persistent challenges in crisis detection is inferring actionable information to support emergency response. Existing methods focus on situational awareness but often lack actionable insights. This study proposes a holistic approach to implementing an actionability extraction system on social media, including requirement gathering, selection of machine learning tasks, data preparation, and integration with existing resources, providing guidance for governments, civil services, emergency workers, and researchers on supplementing existing channels with actionable information from social media. Our solution leverages an actionability schema and domain-adaptive pre-training, improving upon the state-of-the-art model by 5.5% and 10.1% in micro and macro F1 …

Enhancing Stance Classification On Social Media Using Quantified Moral Foundations, Hong Zhang, Quoc-Nam Nguyen, Prasanta Bhattacharya, Wei Gao, Liang Ze Wong, Brandon Siyuan Loh, Joseph J. P. Simons, Jisun An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study enhances stance detection on social media by incorporating deeper psychological attributes, specifically individuals’ moral foundations. These theoretically-derived dimensions aim to provide an interpretable profile of an individual’s moral concerns which, in recent work, has been linked to behaviour in a range of domains including society, politics, health, and the environment. In this paper, we investigate how moral foundation dimensions can contribute to detecting an individual’s stance on a given target. Specifically, we incorporate moral foundation features extracted from text, along with semantic features, to classify stances at both message-and user-levels using traditional machine learning and Large Language Models …

Memetic Memory As Vital Conduits Of Troublemakers In Digital Culture, Alexander O. Smith, Jordan Loewen-Colón

School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship

Recent fears of data capitalism and colonialism often argue using implicit assumptions about cybernetic technology’s ability to automate data about culture. As such, the level of data granularity made possible by cybernetic engineering can be used to dominate society and culture. Here we unpack these implicit assumptions about the datafication of culture through memes, which both act as cultural data and cultural memory. Using Alexander Galloway’s critical method of protocological analysis and descriptions of media tactics, we respond to fears of cybernetic domination. Protocols – the source by which cybernetic technologies enable automated datafication – enables us to respond to …

Unveiling The Dynamics Of Crisis Events: Sentiment And Emotion Analysis Via Multi-Task Learning With Attention Mechanism And Subject-Based Intent Prediction, Phyo Yi Win Myint, Siaw Ling Lo, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the age of rapid internet expansion, social media platforms like Twitter have become crucial for sharing information, expressing emotions, and revealing intentions during crisis situations. They offer crisis responders a means to assess public sentiment, attitudes, intentions, and emotional shifts by monitoring crisis-related tweets. To enhance sentiment and emotion classification, we adopt a transformer-based multi-task learning (MTL) approach with attention mechanism, enabling simultaneous handling of both tasks, and capitalizing on task interdependencies. Incorporating attention mechanism allows the model to concentrate on important words that strongly convey sentiment and emotion. We compare three baseline models, and our findings show that …

From Tweets To Token Sales: Assessing Ico Success Through Social Media Sentiments, Donghao Huang, S. Samuel, Quoc Toan Huynh, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social network technology, the influence of collective opinions has significantly impacted business, marketing, and fundraising. Particularly in the blockchain space, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) gain substantial exposure across various online platforms. Yet, the intricate relationships among these elements remain largely unexplored. This study aims to investigate the relationships between social media sentiment, engagement metrics, and ICO success. We hypothesize a positive correlation between favorable sentiment in ICO-related tweets and overall project success. Additionally, we recognize social media engagement indicators (mentions, retweets, likes, follower counts) as critical factors affecting ICO performance. Employing machine learning techniques, we conduct …

Content Moderation On Social Media: Social And Computational Standards And Implications, Mohit Singhal

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Social media has become a powerful tool that reflects human communication's best and worst aspects. They allow individuals to freely express opinions, communicate with others, and learn about new stories. On the other hand, they have become fertile grounds for several forms of abuse, harassment, and the dissemination of misinformation. Social media platforms have established and employed content moderation to counteract the spread of abuse and misinformation.

Some critical challenges hinder the understanding of the social media content moderation ecosystem. This dissertation investigates various aspects of content moderation, including their coverage, fairness, and effectiveness. Firstly, it investigates how, in practice, …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

The Power Of Identity Cues In Text-Based Customer Service: Evidence From Twitter, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui, Shujing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text-based customer service is emerging as an important channel through which companies can assist customers. However, the use of few identity cues may cause customers to feel limited social presence and even suspect the human identity of agents, especially in the current age of advanced algorithms. Does such a lack of social presence affect service interactions? We studied this timely question by evaluating the impact of customers’ perceived social presence on service outcomes and customers’ attitudes toward agents. Our identification strategy hinged on Southwest Airlines’ sudden requirement to include a first name in response to service requests on Twitter, which …

Impact Of Difficult Negatives On Twitter Crisis Detection, Yuhao Zhang, Siaw Ling Lo, Phyo Yi Win Myint

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter has become an alternative information source during a crisis. However, the short, noisy nature of tweets hinders information extraction. While models trained with standard Twitter crisis datasets accomplished decent performance, it remained a challenge to generalize to unseen crisis events. Thus, we proposed adding “difficult” negative examples during training to improve model generalization for Twitter crisis detection. Although adding random noise is a common practice, the impact of difficult negatives, i.e., negative data semantically similar to true examples, was never examined in NLP. Most of existing research focuses on the classification task, without considering the primary information need of …

Resale Hdb Price Prediction Considering Covid-19 Through Sentiment Analysis, Srinaath Anbu Durai, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter sentiment has been used as a predictor to predict price values or trends in both the stock market and housing market. The pioneering works in this stream of research drew upon works in behavioural economics to show that sentiment or emotions impact economic decisions. Latest works in this stream focus on the algorithm used as opposed to the data used. A literature review of works in this stream through the lens of data used shows that there is a paucity of work that considers the impact of sentiments caused due to an external factor on either the stock or …

Is A Pretrained Model The Answer To Situational Awareness Detection On Social Media?, Siaw Ling Lo, Kahhe Lee, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media can be valuable for extracting information about an event or incident on the ground. However, the vast amount of content shared, and the linguistic variants of languages used on social media make it challenging to identify important situational awareness content to aid in decision-making for first responders. In this study, we assess whether pretrained models can be used to address the aforementioned challenges on social media. Various pretrained models, including static word embedding (such as Word2Vec and GloVe) and contextualized word embedding (such as DistilBERT) are studied in detail. According to our findings, a vanilla DistilBERT pretrained language …

Champions For Social Good: How Can We Discover Social Sentiment And Attitude-Driven Patterns In Prosocial Communication?, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Robert J. Kauffman, Helle Zinner Henriksen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is pursuing a social media strategy to inform people about displaced populations and refugee emergencies. It is actively engaging public figures to increase awareness through its prosocial communications and improve social informedness and support for policy changes in its services. We studied the Twitter communications of UNHCR social media champions and investigated their role as high-profile influencers. In this study, we offer a design science research and data analytics framework and propositions based on the social informedness theory we propose in this paper to assess communication about UNHCR’s mission. Two variables—refugee-emergency and champion …

Social Access And Representation For Autistic Adult Livestreamers, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Adam Mccrimmon, Lora Oehlberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We interviewed 10 autistic livestreamers to understand their motivations for livestreaming on Twitch. Our participants explained that streaming helped them fulfill social desires by: supporting them in making meaningful social connections with others; giving them a safe space to practice social skills like “small talk”; and empowering them to be autistic role models and to share their true selves. This work offers an early report on how autistic individuals leverage livestreaming as a beneficial social platform while struggling with audience expectations.

Does Social Media Accelerate Product Recalls? Evidence From The Pharmaceutical Industry, Yang Gao, Wenjing Duan, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a vital platform for voicing product-related experiences that may not only reveal product defects but also impose pressure on firms to act more promptly than before. This study scrutinizes the rarely-studied relationship between these voices and the speed of product recalls in the context of the pharmaceutical industry where social media pharmacovigilance is becoming increasingly important for the detection of drug safety signals. Using Federal Drug Administration (FDA) drug enforcement reports and social media data crawled from online forums and Twitter, we investigate whether social media can accelerate the product recall process in the context of …

A Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis Of Tweets Pertaining To The 2020 Us Presidential Election, Rao Hamza Ali, Gabriela Pinto, Evelyn Lawrie, Erik J. Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We capture the public sentiment towards candidates in the 2020 US Presidential Elections, by analyzing 7.6 million tweets sent out between October 31st and November 9th, 2020. We apply a novel approach to first identify tweets and user accounts in our database that were later deleted or suspended from Twitter. This approach allows us to observe the sentiment held for each presidential candidate across various groups of users and tweets: accessible tweets and accounts, deleted tweets and accounts, and suspended or inaccessible tweets and accounts. We compare the sentiment scores calculated for these groups and provide key insights into the …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Usability Of Health-Related Websites By Filipino-American Adults And Nursing Informatics Experts, Kathleen Begonia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Filipino-Americans are an understudied minority group with high prevalence and mortality from chronic conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Facing barriers to care and lack of culturally appropriate health resources, they frequently use the internet to obtain health information. It is unknown whether they perceive health-related websites to be useful or easy to use because there are no published usability studies involving this population. Using the Technology Acceptance Model as a theoretical framework, this study investigated the difference between website design ratings by experts and the perceptions of Filipino-American users to determine if usability guidelines influenced the perceived ease …

New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We recently have witnessed two important trends in online retailing: the advent of new media (e.g., social media and search engines) makes advertising affordable for small sellers, and large online retailers (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) opening their platforms to allow even direct competitors to sell on their platforms. We examine how new-media advertising affects retail platform openness. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a leading retailer, who has both valuation and awareness advantages, and a third-party seller, who sells an identical product, engage in price competition. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through new media plays …

What Really Matters?: Characterising And Predicting User Engagement Of News Postings Using Multiple Platforms, Sentiments And Topics, Kholoud K. Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research characterises user engagement of approximately 3,000,000 news postings of 53 news outlets and 50,000,000 associated user comments during 8 months on 5 social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit). We investigate the effect of sentiments and topics on user engagement across four levels of user engagement expressions (i.e. views, likes, comments, cross-platform posting). We find that sentiments and topics differ by both news outlets and social media platforms, and both sentiments and topics by the four levels of user engagement expression. Finally, we predict a volume of four user engagement levels for given news content, …

Did They Really Tweet That?, Caleb Bradford, Michael L. Nelson (Mentor)

Computer & Information Science: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics

No abstract provided.

Does Active Service Intervention Drive More Complaints On Social Media? The Roles Of Service Quality And Awareness, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite many advantages of social media as a customer service channel, there is a concern that active service intervention encourages excessive service complaints. Our paper casts doubt on this misconception by examining the dynamics between social media customer complaints and brand service interventions. We find service interventions indeed cause more complaints, yet this increase is driven by service awareness rather than chronic complaining. Due to the publicity and connectivity of social media, customers learn about the new service channel by observing customer service delivery to others – a mechanism that is unique to social media customer service and does not …

Precision Public Health Campaign: Delivering Persuasive Messages To Relevant Segments Through Targeted Advertisements On Social Media, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Hanya M. Qureshi, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although established marketing techniques have been applied to design more effective health campaigns, more often than not, the same message is broadcasted to large populations, irrespective of unique characteristics. As individual digital device use has increased, so have individual digital footprints, creating potential opportunities for targeted digital health interventions. We propose a novel precision public health campaign framework to structure and standardize the process of designing and delivering tailored health messages to target particular population segments using social media–targeted advertising tools. Our framework consists of five stages: defining a campaign goal, priority audience, and evaluation metrics; splitting the target audience …

How-To Present News On Social Media: A Causal Analysis Of Editing News Headlines For Boosting User Engagement, Kunwoo Park, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Sanjay Chawla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing articles, the research community does not own a sufficient understanding of what kinds of editing strategies effectively promote audience engagement. In this study, we aim to fill the gap by analyzing media outlets' current practices using a data-driven approach. We first build a parallel corpus of original news articles and their corresponding tweets that eight media outlets shared. Then, we explore how those …

On Predicting Personal Values Of Social Media Users Using Community-Specific Language Features And Personal Value Correlation, Amila Silva, Pei Chi Lo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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 of getting users to complete personal value questionnaire, researchers have looked into a non-intrusive and highly scalable approach to predict personal values using user-generated social media data. Nevertheless, geographical differences in word usage and profile information are issues to be addressed when designing such prediction models. In this work, we focus on analyzing Singapore users’ personal values, and developing effective models to predict their personal …

Angrybert: Joint Learning Target And Emotion For Hate Speech Detection, Md Rabiul Awal, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Sandra Mitrović

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated hate speech detection in social media is a challenging task that has recently gained significant traction in the data mining and Natural Language Processing community. However, most of the existing methods adopt a supervised approach that depended heavily on the annotated hate speech datasets, which are imbalanced and often lack training samples for hateful content. This paper addresses the research gaps by proposing a novel multitask learning-based model, AngryBERT, which jointly learns hate speech detection with sentiment classification and target identification as secondary relevant tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to augment three commonly-used hate speech detection datasets. Our experiment …

Escape From An Echo Chamber, Kuan-Chieh Lo, Shih-Chieh Dai, Aiping Xiong, Jing Jiang, Lun-Wei Ku

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An echo chamber effect refers to the phenomena that online users revealed selective exposure and ideological segregation on political issues. Prior studies indicate the connection between the spread of misinformation and online echo chambers. In this paper, to help users escape from an echo chamber, we propose a novel news-analysis platform that provides a panoramic view of stances towards a particular event from different news media sources. Moreover, to help users better recognize the stances of news sources which published these news articles, we adopt a news stance classification model to categorize their stances into “agree”, “disagree”, “discuss”, or “unrelated” …

Chronic Customers Or Increased Awareness? The Dynamics Of Social Media Customer Service, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite that social media has become a promising alternative to traditional call centers, managers hesitate to fully harness its power because they worry that active service intervention may encourage excessive use of the channel by disgruntled customers. This paper sheds light on such a concern by examining the dynamics between brand-level customer complaints and service interventions on social media. Using details of customer-brand interactions of 40 airlines on Twitter, we find that more service interventions indeed cause more customer complaints, accounting for the online customer population and service quality. However, the increased complaints are primarily driven by the awareness enhancement …

Analyzing Tweets On New Norm: Work From Home During Covid-19 Outbreak, Swapna Gottipati, Kyong Jin Shim, Hui Hian Teo, Karthik Nityanand, Shreyansh Shivam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a large-scale work-from-home trend globally in recent months. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of “work-from-home” (WFH) by performing social listening. We propose an analytics pipeline designed to crawl social media data and perform text mining analyzes on textual data from tweets scrapped based on hashtags related to WFH in COVID-19 situation. We apply text mining and NLP techniques to analyze the tweets for extracting the WFH themes and sentiments (positive and negative). Our Twitter theme analysis adds further value by summarizing the common key topics, allowing employers to gain more insights on areas of …

Digital Social Listening On Conversations About Sexual Harassment, Xuesi Sim, Ern Rae Chang, Yu Xiang Ong, Jie Ying Yeo, Christine Bai Shuang Yan, Eugene Wen Jia Choy, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In light of the #MeToo movement and publicized sexual harassment incidents in Singapore in recent years, we built an analytics pipeline for performing digital social listening on conversations about sexual harassment for AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research). Our social network analysis results identified key influencers that AWARE can engage for sexual harassment awareness campaigns. Further, our analysis results suggest new hashtags that AWARE can use to run social media campaigns and achieve greater reach.