Using Functional Schemas to Understand Social Media Narratives

Xinru Yan, Aakanksha Naik, Yohan Jo, Carolyn Rose


Abstract
We propose a novel take on understanding narratives in social media, focusing on learning ”functional story schemas”, which consist of sets of stereotypical functional structures. We develop an unsupervised pipeline to extract schemas and apply our method to Reddit posts to detect schematic structures that are characteristic of different subreddits. We validate our schemas through human interpretation and evaluate their utility via a text classification task. Our experiments show that extracted schemas capture distinctive structural patterns in different subreddits, improving classification performance of several models by 2.4% on average. We also observe that these schemas serve as lenses that reveal community norms.
Anthology ID:
W19-3403
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Storytelling
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Francis Ferraro, Ting-Hao ‘Kenneth’ Huang, Stephanie M. Lukin, Margaret Mitchell
Venue:
Story-NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3403
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3403
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinru Yan, Aakanksha Naik, Yohan Jo, and Carolyn Rose. 2019. Using Functional Schemas to Understand Social Media Narratives. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Storytelling, pages 22–33, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using Functional Schemas to Understand Social Media Narratives (Yan et al., Story-NLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W19-3403.pdf
Code
 xinru1414/Reddit