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.

The behavior and decision making of groups or communities can be dramatically influenced by individuals pushing particular agendas, e.g., to promote or disparage a person or an activity, to call for action, etc.. In the examination of online influence campaigns, particularly those related to important political and social events, scholars often concentrate on identifying the sources responsible for setting and controlling the agenda (e.g., public media). In this article we present a methodology for detecting specific instances of agenda control through social media where annotated data is limited or non-existent. By using a modest corpus of Twitter messages centered on the 2022 French Presidential Elections, we carry out a comprehensive evaluation of various approaches and techniques that can be applied to this problem. Our findings demonstrate that by treating the task as a textual entailment problem, it is possible to overcome the requirement for a large annotated training dataset.

Social media is an extremely potent tool for influencing public opinion, particularly during important events such as elections, pandemics, and national conflicts. Emotions are a crucial aspect of this influence, but detecting them accurately in the political domain is a significant challenge due to the lack of suitable emotion labels and training datasets. In this paper, we present a generalized approach to emotion detection that can be adapted to the political domain with minimal performance sacrifice. Our approach is designed to be easily integrated into existing models without the need for additional training or fine-tuning. We demonstrate the zero-shot and few-shot performance of our model on the 2017 French presidential elections and propose efficient emotion groupings that would aid in effectively analyzing influence campaigns and agendas on social media.

We present the BeSt corpus, which records cognitive state: who believes what (i.e., factuality), and who has what sentiment towards what. This corpus is inspired by similar source-and-target corpora, specifically MPQA and FactBank. The corpus comprises two genres, newswire and discussion forums, in three languages, Chinese (Mandarin), English, and Spanish. The corpus is distributed through the LDC.

Recent advances in large-scale language modeling and generation have enabled the creation of dialogue agents that exhibit human-like responses in a wide range of conversational scenarios spanning a diverse set of tasks, from general chit-chat to focused goal-oriented discourse. While these agents excel at generating high-quality responses that are relevant to prior context, they suffer from a lack of awareness of the overall direction in which the conversation is headed, and the likelihood of task success inherent therein. Thus, we propose a framework in which dialogue agents can evaluate the progression of a conversation toward or away from desired outcomes, and use this signal to inform planning for subsequent responses. Our framework is composed of three key elements: (1) the notion of a “global” dialogue state (GDS) space, (2) a task-specific progression function (PF) computed in terms of a conversation’s trajectory through this space, and (3) a planning mechanism based on dialogue rollouts by which an agent may use progression signals to select its next response.

We describe a system that supports natural language processing (NLP) components for active defenses against social engineering attacks. We deploy a pipeline of human language technology, including Ask and Framing Detection, Named Entity Recognition, Dialogue Engineering, and Stylometry. The system processes modern message formats through a plug-in architecture to accommodate innovative approaches for message analysis, knowledge representation and dialogue generation. The novelty of the system is that it uses NLP for cyber defense and engages the attacker using bots to elicit evidence to attribute to the attacker and to waste the attacker’s time and resources.

We present a paradigm for extensible lexicon development based on Lexical Conceptual Structure to support social engineering detection and response generation. We leverage the central notions of ask (elicitation of behaviors such as providing access to money) and framing (risk/reward implied by the ask). We demonstrate improvements in ask/framing detection through refinements to our lexical organization and show that response generation qualitatively improves as ask/framing detection performance improves. The paradigm presents a systematic and efficient approach to resource adaptation for improved task-specific performance.

This paper describes different approaches to detect malicious content in email interactions through a combination of machine learning and natural language processing tools. Specifically, several neural network designs are tested on word embedding representations to detect suspicious messages and separate them from non-suspicious, benign email. The proposed approaches are trained and tested on distinct email collections, including datasets constructed from publicly available corpora (such as Enron, APWG, etc.) as well as several smaller, non-public datasets used in recent government evaluations. Experimental results show that back-propagation both with and without recurrent neural layers outperforms current state of the art techniques that include supervised learning algorithms with stylometric elements of texts as features. Our results also demonstrate that word embedding vectors are effective means for capturing certain aspects of text meaning that can be teased out through machine learning in non-linear/complex neural networks, in order to obtain highly accurate detection of malicious emails based on email text alone.

Achieving true human-like ability to conduct a conversation remains an elusive goal for open-ended dialogue systems. We posit this is because extant approaches towards natural language generation (NLG) are typically construed as end-to-end architectures that do not adequately model human generation processes. To investigate, we decouple generation into two separate phases: planning and realization. In the planning phase, we train two planners to generate plans for response utterances. The realization phase uses response plans to produce an appropriate response. Through rigorous evaluations, both automated and human, we demonstrate that decoupling the process into planning and realization performs better than an end-to-end approach.

In this paper we describe computational ethnography study to demonstrate how machine learning techniques can be utilized to exploit bias resident in language data produced by communities with online presence. Specifically, we leverage the use of figurative language (i.e., the choice of metaphors) in online text (e.g., news media, blogs) produced by distinct communities to obtain models of community worldviews that can be shown to be distinctly biased and thus different from other communities’ models. We automatically construct metaphor-based community models for two distinct scenarios: gun rights and marriage equality. We then conduct a series of experiments to validate the hypothesis that the metaphors found in each community’s online language convey the bias in the community’s worldview.

In this article we describe our method of automatically expanding an existing lexicon of words with affective valence scores. The automatic expansion process was done in English. In addition, we describe our procedure for automatically creating lexicons in languages where such resources may not previously exist. The foreign languages we discuss in this paper are Spanish, Russian and Farsi. We also describe the procedures to systematically validate our newly created resources. The main contributions of this work are: 1) A general method for expansion and creation of lexicons with scores of words on psychological constructs such as valence, arousal or dominance; and 2) a procedure for ensuring validity of the newly constructed resources.

In this article, we present a method to validate a multi-lingual (English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi) corpus on imageability ratings automatically expanded from MRCPD (Liu et al., 2014). We employed the corpus (Brysbaert et al., 2014) on concreteness ratings for our English MRCPD+ validation because of lacking human assessed imageability ratings and high correlation between concreteness ratings and imageability ratings (e.g. r = .83). For the same reason, we built a small corpus with human imageability assessment for the other language corpus validation. The results show that the automatically expanded imageability ratings are highly correlated with human assessment in all four languages, which demonstrate our automatic expansion method is valid and robust. We believe these new resources can be of significant interest to the research community, particularly in natural language processing and computational sociolinguistics.

Recent studies in metaphor extraction across several languages (Broadwell et al., 2013; Strzalkowski et al., 2013) have shown that word imageability ratings are highly correlated with the presence of metaphors in text. Information about imageability of words can be obtained from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (MRCPD) for English words and Léxico Informatizado del Español Programa (LEXESP) for Spanish words, which is a collection of human ratings obtained in a series of controlled surveys. Unfortunately, word imageability ratings were collected for only a limited number of words: 9,240 words in English, 6,233 in Spanish; and are unavailable at all in the other two languages studied: Russian and Farsi. The present study describes an automated method for expanding the MRCPD by conferring imageability ratings over the synonyms and hyponyms of existing MRCPD words, as identified in Wordnet. The result is an expanded MRCPD+ database with imagea-bility scores for more than 100,000 words. The appropriateness of this expansion process is assessed by examining the structural coherence of the expanded set and by validating the expanded lexicon against human judgment. Finally, the performance of the metaphor extraction system is shown to improve significantly with the expanded database. This paper describes the process for English MRCPD+ and the resulting lexical resource. The process is analogous for other languages.

In this article, we present details about our ongoing work towards building a repository of Linguistic and Conceptual Metaphors. This resource is being developed as part of our research effort into the large-scale detection of metaphors from unrestricted text. We have stored a large amount of automatically extracted metaphors in American English, Mexican Spanish, Russian and Iranian Farsi in a relational database, along with pertinent metadata associated with these metaphors. A substantial subset of the contents of our repository has been systematically validated via rigorous social science experiments. Using information stored in the repository, we are able to posit certain claims in a cross-cultural context about how peoples in these cultures (America, Mexico, Russia and Iran) view particular concepts related to Governance and Economic Inequality through the use of metaphor. Researchers in the field can use this resource as a reference of typical metaphors used across these cultures. In addition, it can be used to recognize metaphors of the same form or pattern, in other domains of research.

In this paper, a computational model based on concept polarity is proposed to investigate the influence of communications across the diacultural groups. The hypothesis of this work is that there are communities or groups which can be characterized by a network of concepts and the corresponding valuations of those concepts that are agreed upon by the members of the community. We apply an existing research tool, ECO, to generate text representative of each community and create community specific Valuation Concept Networks (VCN). We then compare VCNs across the communities, to attempt to find contentious concepts, which could subsequently be the focus of further exploration as points of contention between the two communities. A prototype, CPAM (Changing Positions, Altering Minds), was implemented as a proof of concept for this approach. The experiment was conducted using blog data from pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities. A potential application of this method and future work are discussed as well.

In this paper, we report our efforts in building a multi-lingual multi-party online chat corpus in order to develop a firm understanding in a set of social constructs such as agenda control, influence, and leadership as well as to computationally model such constructs in online interactions. These automated models will help capture the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper, we first introduce our experiment design and data collection method in Chinese and Urdu, and then report on the current stage of our data collection. We annotated the collected corpus on four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics, and meso-topics. Results from the analyses of annotated data on different languages indicate some interesting phenomena, which are reported in this paper.

In this paper, we describe our experience with collecting and creating an annotated corpus of multi-party online conversations in a chat-room environment. This effort is part of a larger project to develop computational models of social phenomena such as agenda control, influence, and leadership in on-line interactions. Such models will help capturing the dialogue dynamics that are essential for developing, among others, realistic human-machine dialogue systems, including autonomous virtual chat agents. In this paper we describe data collection method used and the characteristics of the initial dataset of English chat. We have devised a multi-tiered collection process in which the subjects start from simple, free-flowing conversations and progress towards more complex and structured interactions. In this paper, we report on the first two stages of this process, which were recently completed. The third, large-scale collection effort is currently being conducted. All English dialogue has been annotated at four levels: communication links, dialogue acts, local topics and meso-topics. Some details of these annotations will be discussed later in this paper, although a full description is impossible within the scope of this article.

TTP (Tagged Text Parser) is a fast and robust natural language parser specifically designed to process vast quantities of unrestricted text. TTP can analyze written text at the speed of approximately 0.3 sec/sentence, or 73 words per second. An important novel feature of TTP parser is that it is equipped with a skip-and-fit recovery mechanism that allows for fast closing of more difficult sub-constituents after a preset amount of time has elapsed without producing a parse. Although a complete analysis is attempted for each sentence, the parser may occasionally ignore fragments of input to resume “normal” processing after skipping a few words. These fragments are later analyzed separately and attached as incomplete constituents to the main parse tree. TTP has recently been evaluated against several leading parsers. While no formal numbers were released (a formal evaluation is planned later this year), TTP has performed surprisingly well. The main argument of this paper is that TTP can provide a substantial gain in parsing speed giving up relatively little in terms of the quality of output it produces. This property allows TTP to be used effectively in parsing large volumes of text.