Appeal to values is fundamental in mass persuasive communication. Appropriate framing may enable effective communication campaigns designed to promote vaccination uptake or pro-environmental attitudes, or can be employed to detect propaganda attempts. In this tutorial, we give an overview of how the basic human and moral values are interpreted and quantified according to the psychological literature, how they can be assessed from user generated data, and how they may be employed in persuasion and propaganda identification.
In the first part of the tutorial, we provide an overview of traditional survey methods [24, 10], and discuss their applicability to the new forms of discourse, the validity of recruitment using the Internet [26, 6] and social media [15, 23, 14]. We briefly cover the entailed biases of each source as well as the entire pipeline [22, 5]. Finally, we showcase studies where applying computational methods to large amounts of social media data helped understanding the underlying values associated with specific domains, such as politics [25, 16, 21], health [20, 18, 19], charitable giving [12], and privacy [1].
In the second part of this tutorial, we will lead a hands-on demonstration of tools for (1) moral value extraction from text [3, 4], (2) network analysis for opinion clustering [7], and (3) persuasion techniques identification [8, 28] in two scenarios: the COVID-19 vaccination debate and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the tools will include NLP, network analysis, and persuasion detection techniques giving the attendees tools for incorporating human value analysis in their social media communications research.
No technical prior knowledge of natural language processing, network analysis and machine learning is assumed. Familiarity with Python is helpful for getting the most out of the hands-on session.
As part of the hands-on tutorial, you are invited to execute code in-site. To do so, it is recommended to previously install the following pip packages: numpy, pandas, searborn, matplotlib, scipy, scikit-learn, tqdm, moralstrength. It is possible to install them with the following command:
Yelena Mejova is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy, working in the area of Data Science for Social Impact and Sustainability. Her research concerns the use of social media in health informatics, especially in lifestyle diseases, as well as for tracking political speech and other cultural phenomena. Previously as a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Yelena was a part of the Social Computing Group working on computational social science, especially as applied to tracking real-life health signals. She was the general co-chair of ICWSM’22 and currently, she is the co-Editor-in-Chief of EPJ Data Science.
Kyriaki Kalimeri is a researcher at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy. She received her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Trento and her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete. Her research lies at the intersection of computational social science, social media analysis, and machine learning. The focus is on the automatic prediction of psychological characteristics and moral worldviews from digital data, employing machine learning techniques, translating data into insights for the design of effective communication strategies. She co-organized (with Yelena Mejova) the Social Media and Health workshop in ICWSM’18.
Giovanni Da San Martino is Assiociate Professor at the University of Padova. His research interests are at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. He has co-authored more than 90 papers on the subject in journals and top tier conferences. He received his Ph.D from the University of Bologna in 2009. Prior to joining the University of Padova, he was a Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. He served as general chair for CLEF 2022 and he has been organiser of several events around the topic of propaganda detection and disinformation: workshops (SemEval 2023, CLEF'19--CLEF'22, SocInfo'19, NLP4IF'19--NLP4IF'22), shared tasks (EMNLP'19, SemEval2020, SemEval2021)), tutorials (IJCAI'20, EMNLP'20, WSDM'22, WWW'22). He is member of the Editorial Board of the journals Neural Networks and Information Processing & Management.
Oscar Araque is currently Assistant Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). His research interest includes the application of machine-learning techniques for natural language processing. In addition, his research interests lie in introducing specific domain knowledge into machine learning systems to enhance sentiment and emotion analysis techniques and their applications to new domains, such as radicalization narratives. His work has received four distinguished prizes: Most Cited Scientific Paper Award 2020 by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Prize for the Most Cited Scientific Article Originating from a UPM Doctoral Thesis 2021, ISDEFE Award for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Security and Defense 2020, and Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Award - ETSIT UPM 2022.
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