Skip to main content

Persuasive Language and Virality in Social Networks

  • Conference paper
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 6974))

Abstract

This paper aims to provide new insights on the concept of virality and on its structure - especially in social networks. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being spread (b) virality is a phenomenon with many affective responses, i.e. under this generic term several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised. To give ground to our claims, we provide initial experiments in a machine learning framework to show how various aspects of virality can be predicted according to content features. We further provide a class-based psycholinguistic analysis of the features salient for virality components.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Aaditeshwar Seth, J.Z., Cohen, R.: A multi-disciplinary approach for recommending weblog messages. In: The AAAI 2008 Workshop on Enhanced Messaging (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Berger, J.A., Milkman, K.L.: Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (December 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Carenini, G., Cheung, J.C.K.: Extractive vs. nlg-based abstractive summarization of evaluative text: the effect of corpus controversiality. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG 2008, pp. 33–41. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Gladwell, M.: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little Brown, New York (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Guerini, M., Strapparava, C., Özbal, G.: Exploring text virality in social networks. In: Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011). Barcelona, Spain (July 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Guerini, M., Strapparava, C., Stock, O.: CORPS: A corpus of tagged political speeches for persuasive communication processing. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 5(1), 19–32 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Guerini, M., Strapparava, C., Stock, O.: Evaluation metrics for persuasive nlp with google adwords. In: LREC (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Jamali, S.: Comment Mining, Popularity Prediction, and Social Network Analysis. Master’s thesis, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Jamali, S., Rangwala, H.: Digging digg: Comment mining, popularity prediction, and social network analysis. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Joachims, T.: Text categorization with Support Vector Machines: learning with many relevant features. In: Nédellec, C., Rouveirol, C. (eds.) ECML 1998. LNCS, vol. 1398, pp. 137–142. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Khabiri, E., Hsu, C.F., Caverlee, J.: Analyzing and predicting community preference of socially generated metadata: A case study on comments in the digg community. In: ICWSM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kirby, J., Mardsen, P. (eds.): Connected Marketing, the viral, buzz and Word of mouth revolution. Butterworth-Heinemann, Butterworths (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lerman, K.: Social Information Processing in News Aggregation. IEEE Internet Computing 11(6), 16–28 (2007), http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2007.136

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lerman, K.: User participation in social media: Digg study. In: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops, WI-IATW 2007, pp. 255–258. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2007), http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1339264.1339702

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. Lerman, K., Galstyan, A.: Analysis of social voting patterns on digg. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks, WOSP 2008, pp. 7–12. ACM, New York (2008), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1397735.1397738

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Lerman, K., Ghosh, R.: Information contagion: an empirical study of the spread of news on digg and twitter social networks. In: Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2010 (March 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Mihalcea, R., Strapparava, C.: The lie detector: Explorations in the automatic recognition of deceptive language. In: Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2009), Singapore, pp. 309–312 (August 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Paltoglou, G., Thelwall, M., Buckley, K.: Online textual communications annotated with grades of emotion strength. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop of Emotion: Corpora for Research on Emotion and Affect, pp. 25–31 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Paltoglou, G., Gobron, S., Skowron, M., Thelwall, M., Thalmann, D.: Sentiment analysis of informal textual communication in cyberspace. In: Proceedings of ENGAGE 2010. LNCS, State-of-the-Art Survey, pp. 13–25 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Pennebaker, J., Francis, M.: Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC. Erlbaum Publishers, Mahwah (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Schmid, H.: Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Szabo, G., Huberman, B.A.: Predicting the popularity of online content. Commun. ACM 53, 80–88 (2010), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1787234.1787254

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Vapnik, V.: The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. Springer, New York (1995)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  24. Watts, D.J., Dodds, P.S.: Influentials, networks, and public opinion formation. Journal of Consumer Research 34(4), 441–458 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Strapparava, C., Guerini, M., Özbal, G. (2011). Persuasive Language and Virality in Social Networks. In: D’Mello, S., Graesser, A., Schuller, B., Martin, JC. (eds) Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. ACII 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6974. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24600-5_39

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24600-5_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24599-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24600-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics