Understanding the Semantics of Narratives of Interpersonal Violence through Reader Annotations and Physiological Reactions

Abstract

Interpersonal violence (IPV) is a prominent sociological problem that affects people of all demographic backgrounds. By analyzing how readers interpret, perceive, and react to experiences narrated in social media posts, we explore an understudied source for discourse about abuse. We asked readers to annotate Reddit posts about relationships with vs. without IPV for stakeholder roles and emotion, while measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR), pulse, and facial expression. We map annotations to coreference resolution output to obtain a labeled coreference chain for stakeholders in texts, and apply automated semantic role labeling for analyzing IPV discourse. Findings provide insights into how readers process roles and emotion in narratives. For example, abusers tend to be linked with violent actions and certain affect states. We train classifiers to predict stakeholder categories of coreference chains. We also find that subjects' GSR noticeably changed for IPV texts, suggesting that co-collected measurement-based data about annotators can be used to support text annotation.

Sensing and Learning Human Annotators Engaged in Narrative Sensemaking

“…Second, when the focus is the sorting task, it appears that engaging with tweet sets with high emotional content-whether about or not about the target topic-did not elicit a greater stress response in readers. This adds more understanding to previous research (Calderwood et al, 2017) on emotional and physiological responses to texts.…”

“…Because it is so common in on-and off-line storytelling, annotators can relate to narratives about work. Work is also a less stressful topic, compared to other ones (Calderwood et al, 2017). Tweets with high or low emotional content in general may also affect readers in ways that change how they understand texts (Bohn-Gettler and Rapp, 2011).…”