arXiv Computation and Language

GRID: Modeling Health Influencer Discourse as Argument Networks for Credibility Assessment

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives

The paper introduces a structured framework for claim-level discourse analysis in dense health narratives, addressing the limitations of existing topic- or sentiment-based representations. It identifies an average of 13.22 atomic claims per minute in social media health videos and proposes tuples that link each claim to thematic aspects, stance, and multidimensional pragmatic attributes. A benchmark of 1,191 manually annotated claims from 60 videos across four health domains is created, and experiments show that large language models perform well on thematic categorization and stance prediction but struggle with high-dimensional pragmatic profiling, indicating a need for task-specific inference strategies.

By Farnoushsadat Nilizadeh, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Shirin Nilizadeh, Eduard Dragut
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis

The paper introduces the Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 persuasion dimensions grounded in psychological and communication theories, implemented with 55 lexicon- and rule-based sub-features. PI is modular, allowing individual detectors to be swapped while preserving its theoretical framework. Evaluations on four English argumentative datasets show that PI provides a shared, lightweight feature space that captures meaningful predictive signals and reveals consistent dimension-level associations with persuasion outcomes, with variations across topics and stances.

By Liancheng Gong, Zhiyang Wang, Yiwei Xu, Julia Mendelsohn
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Beyond Binary Detection: A Multi-Dimensional Taxonomy of Cancer Misinformation on Reddit

Cancer-related discussions on social media provide an important space for information exchange and peer support, but also facilitate the spread of misinformation that may influence prevention, screening, and treatment decisions. Existing research on cancer misinformation often relies on narrow definitions, small-scale datasets, or binary labeling frameworks.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Interpretive Variation and Discourse Structure in Detecting Enthymemes in Controversial Political Discourse

The paper investigates how to detect enthymemes—arguments with unstated premises or conclusions—in controversial political tweets about vaccination and immigration. Despite extensive fine‑tuning, models achieve an F1 score of only about 0.67, prompting the authors to propose new evaluation metrics that compare predictions to the full distribution of annotator votes and a model that directly predicts this distribution. The study also shows that models rely on explicit argumentative structure, often missing implicit links that readers must infer, raising concerns for content moderation systems that depend on majority labels.

By Martial Pastor, Nelleke Oostdijk
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

A Multi-Branch Feature Fusion Approach for Health Misinformation Detection and Propagation

This paper introduces a multi‑branch fusion framework that combines transformer‑based semantics, rhetorical cues, stance representations, and psychologically motivated proxies to detect health misinformation and characterize its spread on online social networks. The authors propose an interpretable Cognitive Propagation Score (CPS) derived from text cues that estimate argument complexity, emotional intensity, and virality potential, aiding diffusion‑risk reasoning when engagement data are missing. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (Constraint, COVID‑19_FNIR, Monkeypox) demonstrate near‑perfect classification and ranking performance, with ablation studies showing complementary gains from psychological and rhetorical components.

By Mkululi Sikosana, Sean Maudsley-Barton, Oluwaseun Ajao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

Automated Data Enrichment using Confidence-Aware Fine-Grained Debate among Open-Source LLMs for Mental Health and Online Safety

arXiv:2512. 06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world indicators play an important role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as life events for mental health analysis and risky behaviours for online safety, yet labelling such information is often costly and/or difficult due to its multi-label and dynamic nature.

By Junyu Mao, Anthony Hills, Talia Tseriotou, Maria Liakata, Aya Shamir, Dan Sayda, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Natalie Djohari, Pamela Ugwudike, Mahesan Niranjan, Stuart E. Middleton
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Paid Voices vs. Public Feeds: Interpretable Cross-Platform Theme-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse

arXiv:2601. 13317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion.

By Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu, Tunazzina Islam