Emily Klapper
2026
The Impact of Highlighting Subjective Language on Perceived News Trustworthiness
Mohammad Shokri | Vivek Sharma | Emily Klapper | Shweta Jain | Elena Filatova | Sarah Ita Levitan
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
Mohammad Shokri | Vivek Sharma | Emily Klapper | Shweta Jain | Elena Filatova | Sarah Ita Levitan
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
The rise of misinformation and opinionated articles has made understanding how misleading or biased content influences readers an increasingly important problem. While most prior work focuses on detecting misinformation or deceptive language in real time, far less attention has been paid to how such content is perceived by readers, which is an essential component of misinformation’s effectiveness. In this study, we examine whether highlighting subjective sentences in news articles affects perceived trustworthiness. Using a controlled user experiment and 1,334 article–reader evaluations, we find that highlighting subjective content produces a modest yet statistically significant decrease in trust, with substantial variation across articles and participants. To explain this variation, we model trust change after highlighting subjective language as a function of article-level linguistic features and reader-level attitudes. Our findings suggest that readers’ reactions to highlighted subjective language are driven primarily by characteristics of the text itself, and that highlighting subjective language offers benefits for may help readers better assess the reliability of potentially misleading news articles.
2025
Finding Common Patterns in Domestic Violence Stories Posted on Reddit
Mohammad Shokri | Emily Klapper | Jason Shan | Sarah Ita Levitan
Proceedings of the The 7th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Mohammad Shokri | Emily Klapper | Jason Shan | Sarah Ita Levitan
Proceedings of the The 7th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Domestic violence survivors often share their experiences in online spaces, offering valuable insights into common abuse patterns. This study analyzes a dataset of personal narratives about domestic violence from Reddit, focusing on event extraction and topic modeling to uncover recurring themes. We evaluate GPT-4 and LLaMA-3.1 for extracting key sentences, finding that GPT-4 exhibits higher precision, while LLaMA-3.1 achieves better recall. Using LLM-based topic assignment, we identify dominant themes such as psychological aggression, financial abuse, and physical assault which align with previously published psychology findings. A co-occurrence and PMI analysis further reveals the interdependencies among different abuse types, emphasizing the multifaceted nature of domestic violence. Our findings provide a structured approach to analyzing survivor narratives, with implications for social support systems and policy interventions.