Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulation

Xinyi Mou, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
Social media has emerged as a cornerstone of social movements, wielding significant influence in driving societal change. Simulating the response of the public and forecasting the potential impact has become increasingly important. However, existing methods for simulating such phenomena encounter challenges concerning their efficacy and efficiency in capturing the behaviors of social movement participants. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid framework for social media user simulation, wherein users are categorized into two types. Core users are driven by Large Language Models, while numerous ordinary users are modeled by deductive agent-based models. We further construct a Twitter-like environment to replicate their response dynamics following trigger events. Subsequently, we develop a multi-faceted benchmark SoMoSiMu-Bench for evaluation and conduct comprehensive experiments across real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our method.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.285
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4789–4809
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.285
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyi Mou, Zhongyu Wei, and Xuanjing Huang. 2024. Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 4789–4809, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unveiling the Truth and Facilitating Change: Towards Agent-based Large-scale Social Movement Simulation (Mou et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.285.pdf