Introduction to the Special Issue on Language in Social Media: Exploiting Discourse and Other Contextual Information

Abstract

Social media content is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects, and past experiences. Most social media texts are short online conversational posts or comments that do not contain enough information for natural language processing (NLP) tools, as they are often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual information, including meta-data (e.g., the user’s profile, the social network of the user, and their interactions with other users). Exploiting such different types of context and their interactions makes the automatic processing of social media texts a challenging research task. Indeed, simply applying traditional text mining tools is clearly sub-optimal, as, typically, these tools take into account neither the interactive dimension nor the particular nature of this data, which shares properties with both spoken and written language. This special issue contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of these interactions to process social media data from a new perspective in discourse interpretation. This introduction first provides the necessary background to understand what context is from both the linguistic and computational linguistic perspectives, then presents the most recent context-based approaches to NLP for social media. We conclude with an overview of the papers accepted in this special issue, highlighting what we believe are the future directions in processing social media texts.

Neural-based RST Parsing And Analysis In Persuasive Discourse

“…Various natural language processing techniques have been applied in social media content analysis such as word frequency measures, syntactic structure analysis, sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, or topic modeling. Recently, researchers call for further consideration of contextual factors in the analysis and suggest the exploration of the discourse structure (Benamara et al, 2018). In response to this call, we build a bottom-up transition-based system for discourse parsing using the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework.…”

“…The Discourse parsing tools provide a new perspective in discourse interpretation in social media (Benamara et al, 2018). Son et al (2018) conduct causal explanations in physical and mental health building on discourse parsing; Zakharov et al (2020) develop a novel discourse annotation schema that reflects a hierarchy of discursive strategies for the analysis of contentious and polarizing discussions.…”

“…The pragmatic use of the language in the content is also limitedly explored, such as the analysis of imperative statements in Wikipedia discussions (Xiao and Nickerson, 2019). Arguing for the importance of considering context information in language analysis, Benamara et al (2018) call for more NLP research that "develop tools to automatically determine the structure of discourse, including discourse relations, argumentation, and threads in conversations such as those found in Twitter and other social media" (Benamara et al, 2018, p. 676).…”

Political Persuasiveness: Usage Of Metaphors In American Presidents’ Speeches

“…Mass media discourse represents a channel by means of which flows of information and communicative activities can be transferred in a centralized from to various target audiences which are located in different places and are of different social and political status. Mass media take an integral part in receiving and delivering information to people (Benamara et al, 2018;Katermina, 2018).…”

Linguistic Patterns Of Communication In Social Online Accounts Of Top Russian Journalists

“…individuality is no longer a virtue and divergence, dissent, the do-it-yourself approach and "independent investigations" are perceived as a destructive component of discursive interaction (Benamara et al, 2018;González-Bailón & Wang, 2016), as it leads to tragic consequences, threatens security and undermines trust in state power, moral standards which carries a destructive potential for influencing the development of socio-political systems in the modern world.…”