1,721,262 research outputs found
On Lipschitz Continuity of the Iterated Function System in a Stochastic Optimal Growth Model
Full text link
“The government spies using our webcams:” The language of conspiracy theories in online discussions
No full textConspiracy theories are omnipresent in online discussions—whether to explain a late-breaking event that still lacks official report or to give voice to political dissent. Conspiracy theories evolve, multiply, and interconnect, further complicating efforts to limit their propagation. It is therefore crucial to develop scalable methods to examine the nature of conspiratorial discussions in online communities. What do users talk about when they discuss conspiracy theories online? What are the recurring elements in their discussions? What do these elements tell us about the way users think? This work answers these questions by analyzing over ten years of discussions in r/conspiracy—an online community on Reddit dedicated to conspiratorial discussions. We focus on the key elements of a conspiracy theory: the conspiratorial agents, the actions they perform, and their targets. By computationally detecting agent–action–target triplets in conspiratorial statements, and grouping them into semantically coherent clusters, we develop a notion of narrative-motif to detect recurring patterns of triplets. For example, a narrative-motif such as “governmental agency–controls–communications” appears in diverse conspiratorial statements alleging that governmental agencies control information to nefarious ends. Thus, narrative-motifs expose commonalities between multiple conspiracy theories even when they refer to different events or circumstances. In the process, these representations help us understand how users talk about conspiracy theories and offer us a means to interpret what they talk about. Our approach enables a population-scale study of conspiracy theories in alternative news and social media with implications for understanding their adoption and combating their spread
SENPAI: Supporting exploratory text analysis through semantic & syntactic pattern inspection
No full textAnalyzing language for social computing tasks requires looking beyond individual words. For example, the word “please” generally signals politeness, but more so together with modal verbs (“could you please...”) than without (“please do this.”). Combining semantics and syntax into rich textual patterns is essential to capturing these nuances. What are the relevant patterns for a task, and how to find them? NLP practitioners choose patterns informed by theory, and find them through computational models. However, few tools allow identifying rich patterns without NLP expertise. We introduce SENPAI, a novel tool that discovers combined semantic and syntactic patterns. SENPAI fuses neural embeddings, dependency parsing, and graph mining to surface patterns directly from data. We apply SENPAI to measure credibility, politeness, and sentiment in text. Quantitatively, models powered by SENPAI perform similarly to theoretically-motivated ones. Qualitatively, SENPAI discovers patterns that are interpretable and meaningful. SENPAI enables building computational models without NLP expertise and discovering new linguistic constructs
Conspiracies online: User discussions in a conspiracy community following dramatic events
No full textOnline communities play a crucial role in disseminating conspiracy theories. New theories often emerge in the aftermath of catastrophic events. Despite evidence of their widespread appeal, surprisingly little is known about who participates in these event-specific conspiratorial discussions or how do these discussions evolve over time. We study r/conspiracy, an active Reddit community of more than 200,000 users dedicated to conspiratorial discussions. By focusing on four tragic events and 10 years of discussions, we find three distinct user cohorts: joiners, who never participated in Reddit but joined r/conspiracy only after the event; converts who were active Reddit users but joined r/conspiracy only after the event; and veterans, who are longstanding r/conspiracy members. While joiners and converts have a shorter lifespan in the community in comparison to the veterans, joiners are more active during their shorter tenure, becoming increasingly engaged over time. Finally, to investigate how these events affect users' conspiratorial discussions, we adopted a causal inference approach to analyze user comments around the time of the events. We find that discussions happening after the event exhibit signs of emotional shock, increased language complexity, and simultaneous expressions of certainty and doubtfulness. Our work provides insight on how online communities may detect new conspiracy theories that emerge ensuing dramatic events, and in the process stop them before they spread
Characterizing the social media news sphere through user co-sharing practices
No full textWe describe the landscape of news sources which share social media audience. We focus on 639 news sources, both credible and questionable, and characterize them according to the audience that shares their articles on Twitter. Based on user co-sharing practices, what communities of news sources emerge? We find four groups: one is home to mainstream, high-circulation sources from all sides of the political spectrum; one to satirical, left-leaning sources; one to bipartisan conspiratorial, pseudo-scientific sources; and one to rightleaning, deliberate misinformation sources. Next, we measure which assessments of credibility, impartiality, and journalistic integrity correspond to social media readers' choices of news sources, and uncover the multifaceted structure of the social news sphere. We show how news articles shared on Twitter differ across the four groups along linguistic and psycholinguistics measures. Further, we find that with a high degree of accuracy (~80%), we can classify in what news community an article belongs to. Our data-driven categorization of news sources will help to navigate the complex landscape of online news and has implications for social media platform maintainers to reliably triage questionable outlets
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
