"What is Your Evidence?" A Study of Controversial Topics on Social Media

Aseel A. Addawood, Masooda N. Bashir

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In recent years, social media has revolutionized how people communicate and share information. One function of social media, besides connecting with friends, is sharing opinions with others. Micro blogging sites, like Twitter, have often provided an online forum for social activism. When users debate about controversial topics on social media, they typically share different types of evidence to support their claims. Classifying these types of evidence can provide an estimate for how adequately the arguments have been supported. We first introduce a manually built gold standard dataset of 3000 tweets related to the recent FBI and Apple encryption debate. We develop a framework for automatically classifying six evidence types typically used on Twitter to discuss the debate. Our findings show that a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained with n-gram and additional features is capable of capturing the different forms of representing evidence on Twitter, and exhibits significant improvements over the unigram baseline, achieving a F1 macroaveraged of 82.8%.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2016 - 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Argument Mining, ArgMining 2016
EditorsChris Reed
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1-11
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626173
StatePublished - 2016
Event3rd Workshop on Argument Mining, ArgMining 2016, held at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016 - Berlin, Germany
Duration: Aug 12 2016Aug 12 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference3rd Workshop on Argument Mining, ArgMining 2016, held at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period8/12/168/12/16

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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