United States

While there have been many efforts to monitor or predict Covid using digital traces such as social media, one of the most distinctive and diagnostically important symptoms of Covid -- anosmia, or loss of smell -- remains elusive due to the infrequency of discussions of smell online. It was recently hypothesized that an inadvertent indicator of this key symptom may be misplaced complaints in Amazon reviews that scented products such as candles have no smell. We develop a novel Bayesian vector autoregression model to test this hypothesis, finding that &quot;no smell&quot; reviews do indeed reflect changes in US Covid cases even when controlling for the seasonality of those reviews. A series of robustness checks suggests that this effect is also seen in perfume reviews, and did not hold for the flu prior to Covid. These results suggests that hypothesis-driven models of inadvertent traces may be useful for tracking epidemics using digital records.

ICWSM 2022

This Candle Has No Smell: Detecting the effect of Covid anosmia on Amazon reviews using Bayesian Vector Autoregression

smell

amazon reviews

bayesian statistics

covid

**ICWSM-2022 will be held from June 6th – 9th in a hybrid format, both in-person in Atlanta, Georgia and online.**

**The Workshop and Tutorial Sessions are accessible to those that registered separately for these sessions. If you registered to attend but are not able to access the these sessions from the [Schedule tab](https://underline.io/events/291/schedule?day=2022-06-06T04%3A00%3A00.000Z), please email icwsm@underline.io
**

The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.


ICWSM, now in its sixteenth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science, and previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon network science, machine learning, computational linguistics, sociology, communication, and political science. The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


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Additionally, participants are encouraged to be courteous when sharing screen captures and photographs of conference events. Seek permission when possible and respect requests to take down images if those featured ask. Concerns around code of conduct or inclusion may be sent to icwsm22@aaai.org. If you have any concerns or items to report, please reach out to the General Chairs: Diyi Yang and Yelena Mejova.<br><br>


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The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

While there have been many efforts to monitor or predict Covid using digital traces such as social media, one of the most distinctive and diagnostically important symptoms of Covid -- anosmia, or loss of smell -- remains elusive due to the infrequency of discussions of smell online. It was recently hypothesized that an inadvertent indicator of this key symptom may be misplaced complaints in Amazon reviews that scented products such as candles have no smell. We develop a novel Bayesian vector autoregression model to test this hypothesis, finding that "no smell" reviews do indeed reflect changes in US Covid cases even when controlling for the seasonality of those reviews. A series of robustness checks suggests that this effect is also seen in perfume reviews, and did not hold for the flu prior to Covid. These results suggests that hypothesis-driven models of inadvertent traces may be useful for tracking epidemics using digital records.

poster

During global health crises, the use of data becomes critical to control the spread of infections, to inform the general public and to foster safe behaviors. The ability of people to read and understand data (i.e., data literacy) has the potential to affect human behaviors. In this paper, we study the ability of non-expert human subjects making accurate interpretations of complex pandemic data visualisations designed for general public consumption. We present them with popular plots and graphs that have been shown by traditional and social media, and ask them to answer questions to assess their data literacy at three levels: extracting information, finding relationships among data, and expanding or predicting information. Our results show the presence of variance in interpretations, and reveal insights into how messages communicated through data may be perceived differently by different people. We also highlight the importance of designing communication strategies that ensure the spread of the right message through data.

Exploring Data Literacy Levels in the Crowd -- The Case of COVID-19

While the contagious nature of online toxicity sparked increasing interest in early detection and prevention of it, most of the previous studies focus on the Western world. In this work, we study toxicity triggers in an online community for discussing issues regarding Singapore and conduct a comparative study of toxicity triggers between Singapore and New York City.

Understanding Toxicity Triggers on Reddit in the Context of Singapore

Bias in news reporting can lead to tribalism and division on important issues. Scalable and reliable measurement of such biases is an important first step in addressing them. In this work, based on the intuition that media bias is captured by the tone and word choices in articles, we propose a framework for modeling the relative bias of media outlets through masked token prediction via large-scale pretrained masked language models fine-tuned on articles form news outlets. Through experiments on five diverse and politically polarized topics we show that our framework can capture media bias towards these topics with high reliability. Additionally, our experiments show that our framework is general, in that language models fine-tuned on one topic can be applied to other topics with little drop in performance.

Measuring Media Bias via Masked Language Modeling

The word embedding association test (WEAT) is an important method for measuring linguistic biases against social groups such as ethnic minorities in large text corpora. It does so by comparing the semantic relatedness of words prototypical of the groups (e.g., names unique to those groups) and attribute words (e.g., ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ words). We show that anti-black WEAT estimates from geo-tagged social media data at the level of metropolitan statistical areas strongly correlate with several measures of racial animus—even when controlling for sociodemographic covariates. However, we also show that every one of these correlations is explained by a third variable: the frequency of Black names in the underlying corpora relative to White names. This occurs because word embeddings tend to group positive (negative) words and frequent (rare) words together in the estimated semantic space. As the frequency of Black names on social media is strongly correlated with Black Americans’ prevalence in the population, this results in spurious anti-Black WEAT estimates wherever few Black Americans live. This suggests that research using the WEAT to measure bias should consider term frequency, and also demonstrates the potential consequences of using black-box models like word embeddings to study human cognition and behavior.

Negative Associations in Word Embeddings Predict anti-Black Bias Across Regions--but only via Name Frequency

On Twitter, so-called verified accounts represent celebrities and organizations of public interest, selected by Twitter based on criteria for both activity and notability. Our work seeks to understand the involvement and influence of these accounts in patterns of self-disclosure, namely, voluntary sharing of personal information. In a study of 3 million COVID-19 related tweets, we present a comparison of self-disclosure in verified vs ordinary users. We discuss evidence of peer effects on self-disclosing behaviors and analyze topics of conversation associated with these practices.

The contribution of verified accounts to self-disclosure in COVID-related Twitter conversations

Hate speech has proliferated on social media platforms in recent years. While this has been the focus of many studies, most works have exclusively focused on a single language, generally English. Low-resourced languages have been neglected due to the dearth of labeled resources. These languages, however represent an important portion of the data due to the multilingual nature of social media. This work presents a novel zero-shot, cross-lingual transfer learning pipeline based on pseudo-label fine-tuning of Transformer Language Models for automatic hate speech detection. We employ our pipeline on benchmark datasets covering English (source) and 6 different non-English (target) languages written in 3 different scripts. Our pipeline achieves an average improvement of 7.6% (in terms of macro-F1) over previous zero-shot, cross-lingual models. This demonstrates the feasibility of high accuracy automatic hate speech detection for low-resource languages. We release our code and models at https://github.com/<redacted>.

Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection with pseudo-label fine-tuning of Transformer Language Models

A conversation corpus is essential to build interactive AI applications. 
However, participants' demographic information is relatively understudied mainly due to a lack of individual data. 
In this work, we analyzed a  Korean nationwide daily conversation corpus constructed by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) to characterize the participation of different demographic groups in the corpus.

Who is Missing? Characterizing Participation of Different Demographic Groups in a Korean Nationwide Daily Conversation Corpus

We introduce the Reddit Politosphere, a large-scale resource of online political discourse covering more than 600 political discussion groups over a period of 12 years. It is to the best of our knowledge the largest and ideologically most comprehensive dataset of its type now available. One key feature of the Reddit Politosphere is that it consists of both text and network data, allowing for methodologically-diverse analyses. We describe in detail how we create the Reddit Politosphere, present descriptive statistics, and sketch potential directions for future research based on the resource.

The Reddit Politosphere: A Large-Scale Text and Network Resource of Online Political Discourse

A collection of over 3000 pages of emails sent by Anthony Fauci and his staff were released in an effort to understand the United States government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe how the original PDF document of emails was translated into a resource consisting of json files that make many future studies easy. We include examples for how to convert this email information into a network, a hypergraph, a temporal sequence, and a tensor for subsequent analysis, and discuss use cases and benefits in analyzing the data in these different derived formats. These resources are broadly useful for future research and pedagogical uses in terms of human and system behavioral interactions.

Fauci-email: a json Digest of Anthony Fauci's Released Emails

Currently, publicly available models for website classification do not offer an embedding method and have limited support for languages beyond English. We release a dataset with more than 1M websites in 92 languages with relative labels collected from Curlie, the largest multilingual crowdsourced Web directory. The dataset contains 14 website categories aligned across languages. Alongside it, we introduce Homepage2Vec, a machine-learned pre-trained model for classifying and embedding websites based on their homepage in a language-agnostic way. Homepage2Vec, thanks to its feature set (textual content, metadata tags, and visual attributes) and recent progress in natural language representation, is language-independent by design and can generate embeddings representation. We show that Homepage2Vec correctly classifies websites with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.90, with stable performance across low- as well as high-resource languages. Feature analysis shows that a small subset of efficiently computable features suffices to achieve high performance even with limited computational resources. 
We make publicly available the curated Curlie dataset aligned across languages, the pre-trained Homepage2Vec model, and libraries.

This Candle Has No Smell: Detecting the effect of Covid anosmia on Amazon reviews using Bayesian Vector Autoregression

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Next from ICWSM 2022

Exploring Data Literacy Levels in the Crowd -- The Case of COVID-19

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