We are pleased to share that the “Unraveling Social Perceptions & Behaviors towards Migrants on Twitter” MIRROR project paper authored by the L3S Research Center was accepted to be presented at the 16th International Conference on Web and Social Media 2022.
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.
The paper will be available for download soon in the Publications section on our website.
Title: Unraveling Social Perceptions & Behaviors towards Migrants on Twitter
Authors: Aparup Khatua and Wolfgang Nejdl
Abstract: We draw insights from the social psychology literature to identify two facets of Twitter deliberations about migrants, i.e., perceptions about migrants and behaviors towards migrants. Our theoretical anchoring helped us in identifying two prevailing perceptions (i.e., sympathy and antipathy) and two dominant behaviors (i.e., solidarity and animosity) of social media users towards migrants. We have employed unsupervised and supervised approaches to identify these perceptions and behaviors. In the domain of applied NLP, our study offers a nuanced understanding of migrant-related Twitter de-liberations. Our proposed transformer-based model, i.e., BERT + CNN, has reported an F1-score of 0.76 and outperformed other models. Additionally, we argue that tweets conveying antipathy or animosity can be broadly considered hate speech towards migrants, but they are not the same. Thus, our approach has fine-tuned the binary hate speech detection task by highlighting the granular differences between perceptual and behavioral aspects of hate speeches.
