Sara Owsley Sood

Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites

As online communities grow and the volume of user-generated content increases, the need for community management also rises. Community management has three main purposes: to create a positive experience for existing participants, to promote appropriate, socionormative behaviors, and to encourage potential participants to make contributions. Research indicates that the quality of content a potential participant sees on a site is highly influential; off-topic, negative comments with malicious intent are a particularly strong boundary to participation or set the tone for encouraging similar contributions. A problem for community managers, therefore, is the detection and elimination of such undesirable content. As a community grows, this undertaking becomes more daunting. Can an automated system aid community managers in this task? In this paper, we address this question through a machine learning approach to automatic detection of inappropriate negative user contributions. Our training corpus is a set of comments from a news commenting site that we tasked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers with labeling. Each comment is labeled for the presence of profanity, insults, and the object of the insults. Support vector machines trained on these data are combined with relevance and valence analysis systems in a multistep approach to the detection of inappropriate negative user contributions. The system shows great potential for semiautomated community management.

Profanity use in online communities

As user-generated Web content increases, the amount of inappropriate and/or objectionable content also grows. Several scholarly communities are addressing how to detect and manage such content: research in computer vision focuses on detection of inappropriate images, natural language processing technology has advanced to recognize insults. However, profanity detection systems remain flawed. Current list-based profanity detection systems have two limitations. First, they are easy to circumvent and easily become stale - that is, they cannot adapt to misspellings, abbreviations, and the fast pace of profane slang evolution. Secondly, they offer a one-size fits all solution; they typically do not accommodate domain, community and context specific needs. However, social settings have their own normative behaviors - what is deemed acceptable in one community may not be in another. In this paper, through analysis of comments from a social news site, we provide evidence that current systems are performing poorly and evaluate the cases on which they fail. We then address community differences regarding creation/tolerance of profanity and suggest a shift to more contextually nuanced profanity detection systems.

The Impact of Anonymity in Online Communities

The scale of participation on social news sites has challenged community managers, leaving them unable to detect and remove all inappropriate content by hand. Automated insult and profanity detection systems have helped, but have failed to address the problem of why this content is contributed in the first place. That is, what implications do interface design choices have on the content being generated? One such design choice is whether or not a site allows anonymous comments. What impact does allowing anonymity have on the quality or quantity of participation on a site? This case study analyses the impact of anonymity on a technology social news site, TechCrunch.com. TechCrunch is ideal for this study in that it underwent a shift from allowing anonymous comments (using the Disqus commenting platform) to disallowing them (using the Facebook commenting platform) in March of 2011. We compare the quality of anonymous and real identity comments through measures of reading level, relevance to the target article, negativity and presence of swear words and anger words. We couple this qualitative analysis with a quantitative analysis of the change in participation to give a complete picture of the impact of anonymity in this online community, with the end goal of informing design on similar social news sites.

VIBES: visualizing changing emotional states in personal stories

Online journals (blogs) provide not only an outlet for emotional self-expression, but also a space for social interaction and commiseration through the exchange of personal stories. However, the massive extent of the blogosphere can overwhelm users, restricting their ability to make meaningful connections to fellow bloggers. In this article, we present a system, VIBES, that extracts the important topics from a blog, measures the emotions associated with those topics, and generates a suite of visualizations of this information. Unlike previous research, which has focused on extracting global trends in opinion across the blogosphere, VIBES focuses on depicting the emotional trajectories of the storylines that persist throughout the life experiences of the individual. In user tests, a majority of participants agreed that the visualizations revealed the authors current emotional state and emotional development over time. VIBES has potential applications both in connecting users via shared emotional profiles on social networks, as well as facilitating self-reflection through private user status displays. It also offers a fresh perspective for studying emotions and modeling how they change over time, which has a number of applications in affective computing, including the creation of emotionally responsive interfaces.

Different Strokes of Different Folks: Searching for Health Narratives in Weblogs

The utility of storytelling in the interaction between healthcare providers and patients is now firmly established, but the potential use of large-scale story collections for health-related inquiry has not yet been explored. In particular, the enormous scale of storytelling in personal web logs offers investigators in health-related fields new opportunities to study the behavior and beliefs of diverse patient populations outside of clinical settings. In this paper we address the technical challenges in identifying personal stories about specific health issues from corpora of millions of web log posts. We describe a novel infrastructure for collecting and indexing the stories posted each day to English-language web logs, coupled with user interfaces designed to support targeted searches of these collections. We evaluate the effectiveness of this search technology in an effort to identify hundreds of first person and third person accounts of strokes, for the purpose of studying gender differences in the way that these health emergencies are described. Results indicate that the use of relevance feedback significantly improves the effectiveness of the search. We conclude with a discussion of sample biases that are inherent in web log storytelling and heightened by our approach, and propose ways to mitigate these biases.

Envisioning a Quantitative Studies Center: A Liberal Arts Perspective

Several academic institutions are searching for ways to help students develop their quantitative reasoning abilities and become more adept at higher-level tasks that involve quantitative skills. In this note we study the particular way Pomona College has framed this issue within its own context and what it plans to do about it. To this end we describe our efforts as members of a campus-wide committee that was assigned the duty of investigating the feasibility of founding a quantitative studies center on our campus. These efforts involved analysis of data collected through a faculty questionnaire, discipline-specific input obtained from each departmental representative, and a survey of what some of our peer institutions are doing to tackle these issues. In our studies, we identified three critical needs where quantitative support would be most useful in our case: tutoring and mentoring for entry-level courses; support for various specialized and analytic software tools for upper-level courses; and a uniform basic training for student tutors and mentors. We surmise that our challenges can be mitigated effectively via the formation of a well-focused and -planned quantitative studies center. We believe our process, findings and final proposal will be helpful to others who are looking to resolve similar issues on their own campuses.

Buzz: Mining and Presenting Interesting Stories

Living in a world where the machine and the internet are ubiquitous, many people work and play online, in a world that is, ironically, often isolated and lonesome. While the internet, as intended, connects us to information, products and services, it often draws us away from the rich connections that are created through interpersonal communication. The goal of this work is to use the machine to connect people. Not only to information, products or services, but also to each other. The author proposes to use the machine, the very machine that pulls us apart, to bring us together, connecting people

Stroke Experiences in Weblogs: A Feasibility Study of Sex Differences

Background Research on cerebral stroke symptoms using hospital records has reported that women experience more nontraditional symptoms of stroke (eg, mental status change, pain) than men do. This is an important issue because nontraditional symptoms may delay the decision to get medical assistance and increase the difficulty of correct diagnosis. In the present study, we investigate sex differences in the stroke experience as described in stories on weblogs. Objective The goal of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using the Internet as a source of data for basic research on stroke experiences. Methods Stroke experiences described in blogs were identified by using StoryUpgrade, a program that searches blog posts using a fictional prototype story. In this study, the prototype story was a description of a stroke experience. Retrieved stories coded by the researchers as relevant were used to update the search query and retrieve more stories using relevance feedback. Stories were coded for first- or third-person narrator, traditional and nontraditional patient symptoms, type of stroke, patient sex and age, delay before seeking medical assistance, and delay at hospital and in treatment. Results There were 191 relevant stroke stories of which 174 stories reported symptoms (52.3% female and 47.7% male patients). There were no sex differences for each traditional or nontraditional stroke symptom by chi-square analysis (all Ps>.05). Type of narrator, however, affected report of traditional and nontraditional symptoms. Female first-person narrators (ie, the patient) were more likely to report mental status change (56.3%, 27/48) than male first-person narrators (36.4%, 16/44), a marginally significant effect by logistic regression (P=.056), whereas reports of third-person narrators did not differ for women (27.9%, 12/43) and men (28.2%, 11/39) patients. There were more reports of at least 1 nontraditional symptom in the 92 first-person reports (44.6%, 41/92) than in the 82 third-person reports (25.6%, 21/82, P=.006). Ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke was reported in 67 and 29 stories, respectively. Nontraditional symptoms varied with stroke type with 1 or more nontraditional symptoms reported for 79.3% (23/29) of hemorrhagic stroke patients and 53.7% (36/67) of ischemic stroke patients (P=.001). Conclusions The results replicate previous findings based on hospital interview data supporting the reliability of findings from weblogs. New findings include the effect of first- versus third-person narrator on sex differences in the report of nontraditional symptoms. This result suggests that narrator is an important variable to be examined in future studies. A fragmentary data problem limits some conclusions because important information, such as age, was not consistently reported. Age trends strengthen the feasibility of using the Internet for stroke research because older adults have significantly increased their Internet use in recent years.

Digital Theater: Dynamic Theatre Spaces

Digital technology has given rise to new media forms. Interactive theatre is such a new type of media that introduces new digital interaction methods into theatres. In a typical experience of interactive theatres, people enter cyberspace and enjoy the development of a story in a non-linear manner by interacting with the characters in the story. Therefore, in contrast to conventional theatre which presents predetermined scenes and story settings unilaterally, interactive theatre makes it possible for the viewer to actually take part in the plays and enjoy a first person experience.