Abstract
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word “community” here is deliberate: what is controversial to some audiences may not be so to others. Using data from several different communities on reddit.com, we predict the ultimate controversiality of posts, leveraging features drawn from both the textual content and the tree structure of the early comments that initiate the discussion. We find that even when only a handful of comments are available, e.g., the first 5 comments made within 15 minutes of the original post, discussion features often add predictive capacity to strong content-and- rate only baselines. Additional experiments on domain transfer suggest that conversation- structure features often generalize to other communities better than conversation-content features do.- Anthology ID:
- N19-1166
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1648–1659
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-1166
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-1166
- Cite (ACL):
- Jack Hessel and Lillian Lee. 2019. Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1648–1659, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features (Hessel & Lee, NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/N19-1166.pdf