How people talk about armed conflicts

Jeremy R. Cole, Ying Xu, David Reitter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Armed conflicts around the world produce displacement, injury, and death. This study examines how anonymous and pseudonymous Internet commenters discuss such conflicts. Specifically, we ask how permissible it is to express positive or negative sentiments about these conflicts as a function of variables including region, conflict nature, and severity. Data from the Armed Conflicts Database is aggregated to identify a number of potential factors that may influence views on acceptable sentiments. We used sentiment analysis to code a large-scale sample of the Reddit corpus. We judged permissibility using the Reddit voting features. This revealed that positive sentiments are found not permissible for higher numbers of fatalities, and that negative sentiments are found to be more permissible for certain regions and older conflicts, but less permissible for territorial conflicts. Thus, this study provides evidence that many features help construct public perception of a conflict.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSocial, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling - 9th International Conference, SBP-BRiMS 2016, Proceedings
EditorsNathaniel Osgood, Kevin S. Xu, David Reitter, Dongwon Lee
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages366-376
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783319399300
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event9th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, SBP-BRiMS 2016 - Washington, United States
Duration: Jun 28 2016Jul 1 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9708 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other9th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, SBP-BRiMS 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period6/28/167/1/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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