In contrast to many decades of research on oral code-switching, the study of written multilingual productions has only recently enjoyed a surge of interest. Many open questions remain regarding the sociolinguistic underpinnings of written code-switching, and progress has been limited by a lack of suitable resources. We introduce a novel, large, and diverse dataset of written code-switched productions, curated from topical threads of multiple bilingual communities on the Reddit discussion platform, and explore questions that were mainly addressed in the context of spoken language thus far. We investigate whether findings in oral code-switching concerning content and style, as well as speaker proficiency, are carried over into written code-switching in discussion forums. The released dataset can further facilitate a range of research and practical activities.
The forum r/AmITheAsshole in Reddit hosts discussion on moral issues based on concrete narratives presented by users. Existing analysis of the forum focuses on its comments, and does not make the underlying data publicly available. In this paper we build a new dataset of comments and also investigate the classification of the posts in the forum. Further, we identify textual patterns associated with the provocation of moral judgement by posts, with the expression of moral stance in comments, and with the decisions of trained classifiers of posts and comments.
Using style-transfer models to reduce offensiveness of social media comments can help foster a more inclusive environment. However, there are no sizable datasets that contain offensive texts and their inoffensive counterparts, and fine-tuning pretrained models with limited labeled data can lead to the loss of original meaning in the style-transferred text. To address this issue, we provide two major contributions. First, we release the first publicly-available, parallel corpus of offensive Reddit comments and their style-transferred counterparts annotated by expert sociolinguists. Then, we int…
A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学人工智能学院）；School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University（北京大学城市规划与设计学院）
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the community and counselors. Some of these platforms, such as Reachout, are dedicated forums where the users register to seek help. Others such as Reddit provide subreddits where the users publicly but anonymously post their mental health distress. Although posts are of varying length, it is beneficial to provide a short, but informative summary for fast processing by…
We study the problem of automatic fact-checking, paying special attention to the impact of contextual and discourse information. We address two related tasks: (i) detecting check-worthy claims, and (ii) fact-checking claims. We develop supervised systems based on neural networks, kernel-based support vector machines, and combinations thereof, which make use of rich input representations in terms of discourse cues and contextual features. For the check-worthiness estimation task, we focus on political debates, and we model the target claim in the context of the full intervention of a participan…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology（内塔吉·苏巴斯理工学院）
Sarcasm is an intricate form of speech, where meaning is conveyed implicitly. Being a convoluted form of expression, detecting sarcasm is an assiduous problem. The difficulty in recognition of sarcasm has many pitfalls, including misunderstandings in everyday communications, which leads us to an increasing focus on automated sarcasm detection. In the second edition of the Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2020) workshop, the shared task of sarcasm detection released two datasets, containing responses along with their context sampled from Twitter and Reddit. In this work, we use RoBERTa_l…
University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Loneliness has been associated with negative outcomes for physical and mental health. Understanding how people express and cope with various forms of loneliness is critical for early screening and targeted interventions to reduce loneliness, particularly among vulnerable groups such as young adults. To examine how different forms of loneliness and coping strategies manifest in loneliness self-disclosure, we built a dataset, FIG-Loneliness (FIne-Grained Loneliness) by using Reddit posts in two young adult-focused forums and two loneliness related forums consisting of a diverse age group. We pro…
Bitdefender（比特梵德）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
The DarkWeb represents a hotbed for illicit activity, where users communicate on different market forums in order to exchange goods and services. Law enforcement agencies benefit from forensic tools that perform authorship analysis, in order to identify and profile users based on their textual content. However, authorship analysis has been traditionally studied using corpora featuring literary texts such as fragments from novels or fan fiction, which may not be suitable in a cybercrime context. Moreover, the few works that employ authorship analysis tools for cybercrime prevention usually empl…
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；IUPUI（印第安纳大学-普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校）
Increasing rates of opioid drug abuse and heightened prevalence of online support communities underscore the necessity of employing data mining techniques to better understand drug addiction using these rapidly developing online resources. In this work, we obtain data from Reddit, an online collection of forums, to gather insight into drug use/misuse using text data from users themselves. Specifically, using user posts, we trained 1) a binary classifier which predicts transitions from casual drug discussion forums to drug recovery forums and 2) a Cox regression model that outputs likelihoods o…
Decades of research on differences in the language of men and women have established postulates about preferences in lexical, topical, and emotional expression between the two genders, along with their sociological underpinnings. Using a novel dataset of male and female linguistic productions collected from the Reddit discussion platform, we further confirm existing assumptions about gender-linked affective distinctions, and demonstrate that these distinctions are amplified in social media postings involving emotionally-charged discourse related to COVID-19. Our analysis also confirms consider…
Text Mining and Retrieval Group Leipzig University（莱比锡大学文本挖掘与检索组）
This technical report documents our efforts in addressing the tasks set forth by the 2021 AMoC (Advanced Modelling of Cyber Criminal Careers) Hackathon. Our main contribution is a joint visualisation of semantic and temporal features, generating insight into the supplied data on darknet cybercrime through the aspects of novelty, transience, and resonance, which describe the potential impact a message might have on the overall discourse in darknet communities. All code and data produced by us as part of this hackathon is publicly available.
USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study controversy on Reddit, a popular network of online discussion forums. We collect discussions from a wide variety of topical forums and use emotion detection to recognize a range of emotions from text, including anger, fear, joy, admiration, etc. Our study has three main findings. First, controversial comments express more anger and less admiration, joy and optimism th…
Penn Medicine（宾夕法尼亚大学医学中心）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Individuals recovering from substance use often seek social support (emotional and informational) on online recovery forums, where they can both write and comment on posts, expressing their struggles and successes. A common challenge in these forums is that certain posts (some of which may be support seeking) receive no comments. In this work, we use data from two Reddit substance recovery forums:/r/Leaves and/r/OpiatesRecovery, to determine the relationship between the social supports expressed in the titles of posts and the number of comments they receive. We show that the types of social su…
Sony AI（索尼人工智能研究院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
A significant share of political discourse occurs online on social media platforms. Policymakers and researchers try to understand the role of social media design in shaping the quality of political discourse around the globe. In the past decades, scholarship on political discourse theory has produced distinct characteristics of different types of prominent political rhetoric such as deliberative, civic, or demagogic discourse. This study investigates the relationship between social media reaction mechanisms (i.e., upvotes, downvotes) and political rhetoric in user discussions by engaging in a…
CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局）；Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore（班加罗尔印度科学学院）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
In this paper, we propose a deep, globally normalized topic model that incorporates structural relationships connecting documents in socially generated corpora, such as online forums. Our model (1) captures discursive interactions along observed reply links in addition to traditional topic information, and (2) incorporates latent distributed representations arranged in a deep architecture, which enables a GPU-based mean-field inference procedure that scales efficiently to large data. We apply our model to a new social media dataset consisting of 13M comments mined from the popular internet for…
The COVID-19 pandemic, like many of the disease outbreaks that have preceded it, is likely to have a profound effect on mental health. Understanding its impact can inform strategies for mitigating negative consequences. In this work, we seek to better understand the effects of COVID-19 on mental health by examining discussions within mental health support communities on Reddit. First, we quantify the rate at which COVID-19 is discussed in each community, or subreddit, in order to understand levels of preoccupation with the pandemic. Next, we examine the volume of activity in order to determine…
A Transformer-Based Cross-Platform Analysis of Public Discourse on the 15-Minute City Paradigm
1 College of Science；Engineering, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA Email；3 Texas A\&M Transportation Institute, Texas A\&M University, Houston, Texas, USA Email
Tales of the 2025 Los Angeles Fire: Hotwash for Public Health Concerns in Reddit via LLM-Enhanced Topic Modeling
Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning & Urban Artificial Intelligence Lab, Texas A&M University（景观建筑与城市规划系及城市人工智能实验室，德克萨斯农工大学）；Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison（地理系，威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Google（谷歌）；Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston（环境与职业健康科学系，公共卫生学院，德克萨斯健康科学中心休斯顿分部）；McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston（麦克威廉斯生物医学信息学学院，德克萨斯健康科学中心休斯顿分部）
Leveraging Machine Learning to Identify Gendered Stereotypes and Body Image Concerns on Diet and Fitness Online Forums
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA（美国南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile（智利大学计算机科学系）；Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA（美国加州大学洛杉矶分校精神病学与生物行为科学系）
Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit
DIMES Dept., University of Calabria Italy；IT University of Copenhagen\ Centre for AI Denmark；DIMES Dept., University of Calabria；IT University of Copenhagen\ Centre for AI
Argumentation is a type of discourse where speakers try to persuade their audience about the reasonableness of a claim by presenting supportive arguments. Most work in argument mining has focused on modeling arguments in monologues. We propose a computational model for argument mining in online persuasive discussion forums that brings together the micro-level (argument as product) and macro-level (argument as process) models of argumentation. Fundamentally, this approach relies on identifying relations between components of arguments in a discussion thread. Our approach for relation prediction…
