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2026
Journal article
Open Access
Reddit depression communities as spaces of emotion regulation: a data-informed analysis of coping and engagement
Morini Virginia, Citraro Salvatore, Sajno Elena, Sansoni Maria, Riva Giuseppe, Stella Massimo, Rossetti Giulio
Online social platforms increasingly function as informal self-help environments for individuals experiencing depression, offering spaces for emotional expression and peer support outside traditional clinical settings. However, how coping strategies and psychological engagement states—individuals’ emotional and cognitive involvement in managing their condition—are reflected through online self-disclosure remains poorly understood. We analyzed a large-scale dataset from Reddit depression-related communities to investigate how different psycho-linguistic profiles and coping orientations emerge from users’ language. We collected posts and comments from over 300,000 users across six depression-focused subreddits over two years. User-generated text was characterized through multiple psychological and linguistic dimensions capturing emotions, sentiment, subjectivity, and related features, then aggregated at the user-month level and analyzed using unsupervised clustering techniques. Our analysis identifies four distinct groups characterized by different emotional profiles and dominant coping orientations. These states exhibit meaningful correspondences with established theoretical frameworks, including the Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced model and the Patient Health Engagement model. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale textual data from online communities can provide interpretable insights into coping behaviors and engagement patterns, offering a complementary perspective to traditional approaches for studying mental health.Source: FUTURE INTERNET, vol. 18 (issue 4)
DOI: 10.3390/fi18040198
Project(s): Future Artificial Intelligence Research, Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics
Metrics:
Morini Virginia, Citraro Salvatore, Sajno Elena, Sansoni Maria, Riva Giuseppe, Stella Massimo, Rossetti Giulio
Online social platforms increasingly function as informal self-help environments for individuals experiencing depression, offering spaces for emotional expression and peer support outside traditional clinical settings. However, how coping strategies and psychological engagement states—individuals’ emotional and cognitive involvement in managing their condition—are reflected through online self-disclosure remains poorly understood. We analyzed a large-scale dataset from Reddit depression-related communities to investigate how different psycho-linguistic profiles and coping orientations emerge from users’ language. We collected posts and comments from over 300,000 users across six depression-focused subreddits over two years. User-generated text was characterized through multiple psychological and linguistic dimensions capturing emotions, sentiment, subjectivity, and related features, then aggregated at the user-month level and analyzed using unsupervised clustering techniques. Our analysis identifies four distinct groups characterized by different emotional profiles and dominant coping orientations. These states exhibit meaningful correspondences with established theoretical frameworks, including the Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced model and the Patient Health Engagement model. Our findings demonstrate that large-scale textual data from online communities can provide interpretable insights into coping behaviors and engagement patterns, offering a complementary perspective to traditional approaches for studying mental health.Source: FUTURE INTERNET, vol. 18 (issue 4)
DOI: 10.3390/fi18040198
Project(s): Future Artificial Intelligence Research, Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS 
| www.mdpi.com | CNR IRIS 
2025
Other
Open Access
ISTI-day 2025 Proceedings
Del Corso G., Pedrotti A., Federico G., Gennaro C., Carrara F., Amato G., Di Benedetto M., Gabrielli E., Belli D., Matrullo Zoe, Miori V., Tolomei Gabriele, Waheed T., Marchetti E., Calabrò Antonello., Rossetti G., Stella Massimo, Cazabet Rémy, Abramski K., Cau E., Citraro S., Failla A., Mesina V., Morini V., Pansanella V., Colantonio S., Germanese D., Pascali M. A., Bianchi L., Messina N., Falchi F., Barsellotti L., Pacini G., Cassese M., Puccetti G., Esuli A., Volpi L., Moreo Alejandro, Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Nguyen Dong, Broccia G., Ter Beek M. H., Ferrari A., Massink M., Belmonte Gina, Ciancia V., Papini O., Canapa G., Catricalà B., Manca M., Paternò F., Santoro C., Zedda E., Gallo S., Maenza S., Mattioli A., Simeoli L., Rucci D., Carlini E., Dazzi P., Kavalionak H., Mordacchini M., Rulli C., Muntean Cristina Ioana, Nardini F. M., Perego R., Rocchietti G., Lettich F., Renso C., Pugliese C., Casini G., Haldimann Jonas, Meyer Thomas, Assante M., Candela L., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Mangiacrapa F., Oliviero A., Pagano P., Panichi G., Peccerillo B., Procaccini M., Mannocci A., Manghi P., Lonetti F., Kang Dongjae, Di Giandomenico F., Jee Eunkyoung, Lazzini G., Conti F., Scopigno R., D'Acunto M., Moroni D., Cafiso M., Paradisi P., Callieri M., Pavoni G., Corsini M., De Falco A., Sala F., Saraceni Q., Gattiglia Gabriele
ISTI-Day is an annual information and networking event organized by the Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This event features an opening talk of the Director of the Dept. DIITET (Emilio F. Campana) as well as an overview of the Institute's activities presented by the ISTI Director (Roberto Scopigno). Those institutional segments are complemented by dedicated presentations and round tables featuring former staff members, as well as internal and external collaborators. To foster a network of knowledge and collaboration among newcomers, the 2025 ISTI Day edition also includes a large poster session that provides a comprehensive overview of current research activities. Each of the 13 laboratories contributes 1–3 posters, highlighting the most innovative work and offering early-career researchers a platform for discussion. Thus these proceedings include the posters selected for ISTI-Day 2025, reflecting the diverse and innovative nature of the Institute's research.
Del Corso G., Pedrotti A., Federico G., Gennaro C., Carrara F., Amato G., Di Benedetto M., Gabrielli E., Belli D., Matrullo Zoe, Miori V., Tolomei Gabriele, Waheed T., Marchetti E., Calabrò Antonello., Rossetti G., Stella Massimo, Cazabet Rémy, Abramski K., Cau E., Citraro S., Failla A., Mesina V., Morini V., Pansanella V., Colantonio S., Germanese D., Pascali M. A., Bianchi L., Messina N., Falchi F., Barsellotti L., Pacini G., Cassese M., Puccetti G., Esuli A., Volpi L., Moreo Alejandro, Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Nguyen Dong, Broccia G., Ter Beek M. H., Ferrari A., Massink M., Belmonte Gina, Ciancia V., Papini O., Canapa G., Catricalà B., Manca M., Paternò F., Santoro C., Zedda E., Gallo S., Maenza S., Mattioli A., Simeoli L., Rucci D., Carlini E., Dazzi P., Kavalionak H., Mordacchini M., Rulli C., Muntean Cristina Ioana, Nardini F. M., Perego R., Rocchietti G., Lettich F., Renso C., Pugliese C., Casini G., Haldimann Jonas, Meyer Thomas, Assante M., Candela L., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Mangiacrapa F., Oliviero A., Pagano P., Panichi G., Peccerillo B., Procaccini M., Mannocci A., Manghi P., Lonetti F., Kang Dongjae, Di Giandomenico F., Jee Eunkyoung, Lazzini G., Conti F., Scopigno R., D'Acunto M., Moroni D., Cafiso M., Paradisi P., Callieri M., Pavoni G., Corsini M., De Falco A., Sala F., Saraceni Q., Gattiglia Gabriele
ISTI-Day is an annual information and networking event organized by the Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This event features an opening talk of the Director of the Dept. DIITET (Emilio F. Campana) as well as an overview of the Institute's activities presented by the ISTI Director (Roberto Scopigno). Those institutional segments are complemented by dedicated presentations and round tables featuring former staff members, as well as internal and external collaborators. To foster a network of knowledge and collaboration among newcomers, the 2025 ISTI Day edition also includes a large poster session that provides a comprehensive overview of current research activities. Each of the 13 laboratories contributes 1–3 posters, highlighting the most innovative work and offering early-career researchers a platform for discussion. Thus these proceedings include the posters selected for ISTI-Day 2025, reflecting the diverse and innovative nature of the Institute's research.
See at:
CNR IRIS | www.isti.cnr.it | CNR IRIS
2025
Journal article
Open Access
Participant behavior and community response in online mental health communities: insights from Reddit
Morini V., Sansoni M., Rossetti G., Pedreschi D., Castillo C.
The growing presence of online mutual-help communities has significantly changed how people access and provide mental health (MH) support. While extensive research has explored self-disclosure and social support dynamics within these communities, less is known about users’ distinctive behavioral patterns, posting intents, and community response. This study analyzed a large-scale, five-year Reddit dataset of 67 MH-related subreddits, comprising over 3.4 million posts and 24 million comments from approximately 2.4 million users. We categorized subreddits based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and compared the behavioral patterns in these communities with Reddit non-MH ones. Leveraging Reddit's post flair feature, we defined a ground truth for post intents and applied an automated classification method to infer intents across the dataset. We then used causal inference analysis to assess the effect of community responses on subsequent user behavior. Our analysis revealed that MH-related subreddits featured unique characteristics in content length, throwaway account usage, user actions, persistence, and community response. These online behaviors mirrored those in other mutual-help Reddit communities and resonated with offline patterns while diverging from non-support-oriented subreddits. We also found that seeking support and venting are the predominant posting intents, with users tending to maintain consistent intents over time. Furthermore, we observed that receiving comments and reactions significantly influenced users’ follow-up engagement, fostering increased participation. These findings highlight the supportive role of online MH communities and emphasize the need for tailored design to optimize user experience and support for individuals facing MH challenges.Source: COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR, vol. 165
DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2024.108544
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Morini V., Sansoni M., Rossetti G., Pedreschi D., Castillo C.
The growing presence of online mutual-help communities has significantly changed how people access and provide mental health (MH) support. While extensive research has explored self-disclosure and social support dynamics within these communities, less is known about users’ distinctive behavioral patterns, posting intents, and community response. This study analyzed a large-scale, five-year Reddit dataset of 67 MH-related subreddits, comprising over 3.4 million posts and 24 million comments from approximately 2.4 million users. We categorized subreddits based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and compared the behavioral patterns in these communities with Reddit non-MH ones. Leveraging Reddit's post flair feature, we defined a ground truth for post intents and applied an automated classification method to infer intents across the dataset. We then used causal inference analysis to assess the effect of community responses on subsequent user behavior. Our analysis revealed that MH-related subreddits featured unique characteristics in content length, throwaway account usage, user actions, persistence, and community response. These online behaviors mirrored those in other mutual-help Reddit communities and resonated with offline patterns while diverging from non-support-oriented subreddits. We also found that seeking support and venting are the predominant posting intents, with users tending to maintain consistent intents over time. Furthermore, we observed that receiving comments and reactions significantly influenced users’ follow-up engagement, fostering increased participation. These findings highlight the supportive role of online MH communities and emphasize the need for tailored design to optimize user experience and support for individuals facing MH challenges.Source: COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR, vol. 165
DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2024.108544
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
Computers in Human Behavior | CNR IRIS | www.sciencedirect.com | CNR IRIS
2024
Conference article
Open Access
Diachronic political content analysis: a comparative study of topics and sentiments in Echo Chambers and beyond
Maggini M. J., Morini V., Bass D., Rossetti G.
Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as significant arenas for political discourse and agenda-setting. Among these platforms, Reddit stands out as a prominent site where users actively engage in discussions on controversial topics, often becoming polarized through interactions with like-minded individuals. In this paper, we delve into the realm of political leanings, seeking to understand the predominant topics of interest within echo chambers and whether they diverge from those of unpolarized users. Our primary objective is to ascertain whether echo chambers are characterized by distinct themes discussed therein. Furthermore, we employ cross-sentiment analysis to investigate potential differences in how these themes are perceived across different groups.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, vol. 3782. Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 20/10/2024
Maggini M. J., Morini V., Bass D., Rossetti G.
Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as significant arenas for political discourse and agenda-setting. Among these platforms, Reddit stands out as a prominent site where users actively engage in discussions on controversial topics, often becoming polarized through interactions with like-minded individuals. In this paper, we delve into the realm of political leanings, seeking to understand the predominant topics of interest within echo chambers and whether they diverge from those of unpolarized users. Our primary objective is to ascertain whether echo chambers are characterized by distinct themes discussed therein. Furthermore, we employ cross-sentiment analysis to investigate potential differences in how these themes are perceived across different groups.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, vol. 3782. Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 20/10/2024
See at:
ceur-ws.org | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS
2024
Conference article
Open Access
Whose voice matters? Authority and influence in the Italian Twitter debates on Covid-19
Mesina V., Failla A., Morini V., Rossetti G.
The Covid-19 pandemic intensified public discourse on social media, with Twitter becoming a key platform for information exchange. In such environments, authorities—influential figures from various domains—play a crucial role in shaping public opinion, having the power to influence offline behaviors both individually and collectively. In this work, we study the role of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine authorities within the Italian Twitter debate on Covid-19 in five contextually relevant temporal windows corresponding to different pandemic phases. Analyzing a dataset of over ∼50M tweets, we identify central actors and quantify both their impact and their influence on users’ opinions. Our results suggest that while anti-vax authorities were able to gain more consensus during the vaccination phases, pro-vax authorities became more influential in the latter stage of the vaccination campaign.Source: STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, vol. 1188, pp. 352-363. Istanbul, Türkiye, 10-12/12/2024
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-82431-9_29
Metrics:
Mesina V., Failla A., Morini V., Rossetti G.
The Covid-19 pandemic intensified public discourse on social media, with Twitter becoming a key platform for information exchange. In such environments, authorities—influential figures from various domains—play a crucial role in shaping public opinion, having the power to influence offline behaviors both individually and collectively. In this work, we study the role of pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine authorities within the Italian Twitter debate on Covid-19 in five contextually relevant temporal windows corresponding to different pandemic phases. Analyzing a dataset of over ∼50M tweets, we identify central actors and quantify both their impact and their influence on users’ opinions. Our results suggest that while anti-vax authorities were able to gain more consensus during the vaccination phases, pro-vax authorities became more influential in the latter stage of the vaccination campaign.Source: STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, vol. 1188, pp. 352-363. Istanbul, Türkiye, 10-12/12/2024
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-82431-9_29
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | link.springer.com | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS
2024
Journal article
Open Access
Trends and topics: characterizing echo chambers’ topological stability and in-group attitudes
Cau E., Morini V., Rossetti G.
Nowadays, online debates focusing on a wide spectrum of topics are often characterized by clashes of polarized communities, each fiercely supporting a specific stance. Such debates are sometimes fueled by the presence of echo chambers, insulated systems whose users’ opinions are exacerbated due to the effect of repetition and by the active exclusion of opposite views. This paper offers a framework to explore how echo chambers evolve through time, considering their users’ interaction patterns and the content/attitude they convey while addressing specific controversial issues. The framework is then tested on three Reddit case studies focused on sociopolitical issues (gun control, American politics, and minority discrimination) during the first two years and a half of Donald Trump’s presidency and on an X/Twitter dataset involving BLM discussion tied to the EURO 2020 football championship. Analytical results unveil that polarized users will likely keep their affiliation to echo chambers in time. Moreover, we observed that the attitudes conveyed by Reddit users who joined risky epistemic enclaves are characterized by a slight inclination toward a more negative or neutral attitude when discussing particularly sensitive issues (e.g., fascism, school shootings, or police violence) while X/Twitter ones often tend to express more positive feelings w.r.t. those involved into less polarized communities.Source: PLOS COMPLEX SYSTEMS, vol. 1 (issue 2)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000008
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.15610
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Cau E., Morini V., Rossetti G.
Nowadays, online debates focusing on a wide spectrum of topics are often characterized by clashes of polarized communities, each fiercely supporting a specific stance. Such debates are sometimes fueled by the presence of echo chambers, insulated systems whose users’ opinions are exacerbated due to the effect of repetition and by the active exclusion of opposite views. This paper offers a framework to explore how echo chambers evolve through time, considering their users’ interaction patterns and the content/attitude they convey while addressing specific controversial issues. The framework is then tested on three Reddit case studies focused on sociopolitical issues (gun control, American politics, and minority discrimination) during the first two years and a half of Donald Trump’s presidency and on an X/Twitter dataset involving BLM discussion tied to the EURO 2020 football championship. Analytical results unveil that polarized users will likely keep their affiliation to echo chambers in time. Moreover, we observed that the attitudes conveyed by Reddit users who joined risky epistemic enclaves are characterized by a slight inclination toward a more negative or neutral attitude when discussing particularly sensitive issues (e.g., fascism, school shootings, or police violence) while X/Twitter ones often tend to express more positive feelings w.r.t. those involved into less polarized communities.Source: PLOS COMPLEX SYSTEMS, vol. 1 (issue 2)
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000008
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.15610
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
arXiv.org e-Print Archive | doi.org | CNR IRIS | journals.plos.org | doi.org | CNR IRIS
2024
Journal article
Open Access
Online posting effects: unveiling the non-linear journeys of users in depression communities on Reddit
Morini V., Citraro S., Sajno E., Sansoni M., Riva G., Stella M., Rossetti G.
Social media platforms have become pivotal as self-help forums, enabling individuals to share personal experiences and seek support. However, on topics as sensitive as depression, what are the consequences of online self-disclosure? Here, we delve into the dynamics of mental health discourse on various Reddit boards focused on depression. To this aim, we introduce a data-informed framework reconstructing online dynamics from 303k users interacting over two years. Through user-generated content, we identify 4 distinct clusters representing different psychological states. Our analysis unveils online posting effects: a user can transition to another psychological state after online exposure to peers’ emotional/semantic content. As described by conditional Markov chains and different levels of social exposure, users’ transitions reveal navigation through both positive and negative phases in a spiral rather than a linear progression. Interpreted in light of psychological literature, related particularly to the Patient Health Engagement (PHE) model, our findings can provide evidence that the type and layout of online social interactions have an impact on users’ “journeys” when posting about depression.Source: COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR REPORTS, vol. 17 (issue 100542 (n. articolo))
DOI: 10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100542
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Morini V., Citraro S., Sajno E., Sansoni M., Riva G., Stella M., Rossetti G.
Social media platforms have become pivotal as self-help forums, enabling individuals to share personal experiences and seek support. However, on topics as sensitive as depression, what are the consequences of online self-disclosure? Here, we delve into the dynamics of mental health discourse on various Reddit boards focused on depression. To this aim, we introduce a data-informed framework reconstructing online dynamics from 303k users interacting over two years. Through user-generated content, we identify 4 distinct clusters representing different psychological states. Our analysis unveils online posting effects: a user can transition to another psychological state after online exposure to peers’ emotional/semantic content. As described by conditional Markov chains and different levels of social exposure, users’ transitions reveal navigation through both positive and negative phases in a spiral rather than a linear progression. Interpreted in light of psychological literature, related particularly to the Patient Health Engagement (PHE) model, our findings can provide evidence that the type and layout of online social interactions have an impact on users’ “journeys” when posting about depression.Source: COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR REPORTS, vol. 17 (issue 100542 (n. articolo))
DOI: 10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100542
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
Computers in Human Behavior Reports | CNR IRIS | www.sciencedirect.com | CNR IRIS
2023
Journal article
Open Access
Cognitive network neighborhoods quantify feelings expressed in suicide notes and Reddit mental health communities
Joseph Sm, Citraro S, Morini V, Rossetti G, Stella M
Writing messages is key to expressing feelings. This study adopts cognitive network science to reconstruct how individuals report their feelings in clinical narratives like suicide notes or mental health posts. We achieve this by reconstructing syntactic/semantic associations between concepts in texts as co-occurrences enriched with affective data. We transform 142 suicide notes and 77,000 Reddit posts from the r/anxiety, r/depression, r/schizophrenia, and r/do-it-your-own (r/DIY) forums into 5 cognitive networks, each one expressing meanings and emotions as reported by authors. These networks reconstruct the semantic frames surrounding "feel", stem for "to feel" and "feelings", enabling a quantification of prominent associations and emotions focused around feelings. We find strong feelings of sadness across all clinical Reddit boards, added to fear r/depression, and replaced by joy/anticipation in r/DIY. Semantic communities and topic modeling both highlight key narrative topics of "regret", "unhealthy lifestyle" and "low mental well-being". Importantly, negative associations and emotions co-existed with trustful/positive language, focused on "getting better". This emotional polarization provides quantitative evidence that online clinical boards possess a complex structure, where users mix both positive and negative outlooks. This dichotomy is absent in the DIY reference board and in suicide notes, where negative emotional associations about regret and pain persist but are overwhelmed by positive jargon addressing loved ones. Our network-based comparisons provide quantitative evidence that suicide notes encapsulate different ways of expressing feelings compared to online Reddit boards, the latter acting more like personal diaries and relief valves. Our findings provide an interpretable network-based aid for supporting psychological inquiries of human feelings in digital and clinical settings.Source: PHYSICA. A, vol. 610 (issue 128336)
DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.128336
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Joseph Sm, Citraro S, Morini V, Rossetti G, Stella M
Writing messages is key to expressing feelings. This study adopts cognitive network science to reconstruct how individuals report their feelings in clinical narratives like suicide notes or mental health posts. We achieve this by reconstructing syntactic/semantic associations between concepts in texts as co-occurrences enriched with affective data. We transform 142 suicide notes and 77,000 Reddit posts from the r/anxiety, r/depression, r/schizophrenia, and r/do-it-your-own (r/DIY) forums into 5 cognitive networks, each one expressing meanings and emotions as reported by authors. These networks reconstruct the semantic frames surrounding "feel", stem for "to feel" and "feelings", enabling a quantification of prominent associations and emotions focused around feelings. We find strong feelings of sadness across all clinical Reddit boards, added to fear r/depression, and replaced by joy/anticipation in r/DIY. Semantic communities and topic modeling both highlight key narrative topics of "regret", "unhealthy lifestyle" and "low mental well-being". Importantly, negative associations and emotions co-existed with trustful/positive language, focused on "getting better". This emotional polarization provides quantitative evidence that online clinical boards possess a complex structure, where users mix both positive and negative outlooks. This dichotomy is absent in the DIY reference board and in suicide notes, where negative emotional associations about regret and pain persist but are overwhelmed by positive jargon addressing loved ones. Our network-based comparisons provide quantitative evidence that suicide notes encapsulate different ways of expressing feelings compared to online Reddit boards, the latter acting more like personal diaries and relief valves. Our findings provide an interpretable network-based aid for supporting psychological inquiries of human feelings in digital and clinical settings.Source: PHYSICA. A, vol. 610 (issue 128336)
DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.128336
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | ISTI Repository | www.sciencedirect.com | Physica A Statistical Mechanics and its Applications | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS
2023
Conference article
Open Access
Exposing racial dialect bias in abusive language detection: can explainability play a role?
Manerba Mm, Morini V
Biases can arise and be introduced during each phase of a supervised learning pipeline, eventually leading to harm. Within the task of automatic abusive language detection, this matter becomes particularly severe since unintended bias towards sensitive topics such as gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity can harm underrepresented groups. The role of the datasets used to train these models is crucial to address these challenges. In this contribution, we investigate whether explainability methods can expose racial dialect bias attested within a popular dataset for abusive language detection. Through preliminary experiments, we found that pure explainability techniques cannot effectively uncover biases within the dataset under analysis: the rooted stereotypes are often more implicit and complex to retrieve.Source: COMMUNICATIONS IN COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE (PRINT), pp. 483-497. Grenoble, France, 19-23/09/2022
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-23618-1_32
Project(s): TAILOR, HumanE-AI-Net , SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Manerba Mm, Morini V
Biases can arise and be introduced during each phase of a supervised learning pipeline, eventually leading to harm. Within the task of automatic abusive language detection, this matter becomes particularly severe since unintended bias towards sensitive topics such as gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity can harm underrepresented groups. The role of the datasets used to train these models is crucial to address these challenges. In this contribution, we investigate whether explainability methods can expose racial dialect bias attested within a popular dataset for abusive language detection. Through preliminary experiments, we found that pure explainability techniques cannot effectively uncover biases within the dataset under analysis: the rooted stereotypes are often more implicit and complex to retrieve.Source: COMMUNICATIONS IN COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE (PRINT), pp. 483-497. Grenoble, France, 19-23/09/2022
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-23618-1_32
Project(s): TAILOR
, HumanE-AI-Net , SoBigData-PlusPlus Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | link.springer.com | ISTI Repository | doi.org | CNR IRIS
2023
Contribution to book
Metadata Only Access
Towards a social Artificial Intelligence
Pedreschi D, Dignum F, Morini V, Pansanella V, Cornacchia G
Artificial Intelligence can both empower individuals to face complex societal challenges and exacerbate problems and vulnerabilities, such as bias, inequalities, and polarization. For scientists, an open challenge is how to shape and regulate human-centered Artificial Intelligence ecosystems that help mitigate harms and foster beneficial outcomes oriented at the social good. In this tutorial, we discuss such an issue from two sides. First, we explore the network effects of Artificial Intelligence and their impact on society by investigating its role in social media, mobility, and economic scenarios. We further provide different strategies that can be used to model, characterize and mitigate the network effects of particular Artificial Intelligence driven individual behavior. Secondly, we promote the use of behavioral models as an addition to the data-based approach to get a further grip on emerging phenomena in society that depend on physical events for which no data are readily available. An example of this is tracking extremist behavior in order to prevent violent events. In the end, we illustrate some case studies in-depth and provide the appropriate tools to get familiar with these concepts.DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24349-3_21
Metrics:
Pedreschi D, Dignum F, Morini V, Pansanella V, Cornacchia G
Artificial Intelligence can both empower individuals to face complex societal challenges and exacerbate problems and vulnerabilities, such as bias, inequalities, and polarization. For scientists, an open challenge is how to shape and regulate human-centered Artificial Intelligence ecosystems that help mitigate harms and foster beneficial outcomes oriented at the social good. In this tutorial, we discuss such an issue from two sides. First, we explore the network effects of Artificial Intelligence and their impact on society by investigating its role in social media, mobility, and economic scenarios. We further provide different strategies that can be used to model, characterize and mitigate the network effects of particular Artificial Intelligence driven individual behavior. Secondly, we promote the use of behavioral models as an addition to the data-based approach to get a further grip on emerging phenomena in society that depend on physical events for which no data are readily available. An example of this is tracking extremist behavior in order to prevent violent events. In the end, we illustrate some case studies in-depth and provide the appropriate tools to get familiar with these concepts.DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24349-3_21
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | link.springer.com
2023
Conference article
Open Access
Will you take the knee? Italian twitter echo chambers' genesis during EURO 2020
Buongiovanni C, Candusso R, Cerretini G, Febbe D, Morini V, Rossetti G
Echo chambers can be described as situations in which individuals encounter and interact only with viewpoints that confirm their own, thus moving, as a group, to more polarized and extreme positions. Recent literature mainly focuses on characterizing such entities via static observations, thus disregarding their temporal dimension. In this work, distancing from such a trend, we study, at multiple topological levels, echo chambers genesis related to the social discussions that took place in Italy during the EURO 2020 Championship. Our analysis focuses on a well-defined topic (i.e., BLM/racism) discussed on Twitter during a perfect temporally bound (sporting) event. Such characteristics allow us to track the rise and evolution of echo chambers in time, thus relating their existence to specific episodes.Source: STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE (INTERNET), pp. 29-40. Palermo, Italy, 08-10/11/2022
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-21127-0_3
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Buongiovanni C, Candusso R, Cerretini G, Febbe D, Morini V, Rossetti G
Echo chambers can be described as situations in which individuals encounter and interact only with viewpoints that confirm their own, thus moving, as a group, to more polarized and extreme positions. Recent literature mainly focuses on characterizing such entities via static observations, thus disregarding their temporal dimension. In this work, distancing from such a trend, we study, at multiple topological levels, echo chambers genesis related to the social discussions that took place in Italy during the EURO 2020 Championship. Our analysis focuses on a well-defined topic (i.e., BLM/racism) discussed on Twitter during a perfect temporally bound (sporting) event. Such characteristics allow us to track the rise and evolution of echo chambers in time, thus relating their existence to specific episodes.Source: STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE (INTERNET), pp. 29-40. Palermo, Italy, 08-10/11/2022
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-21127-0_3
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | link.springer.com | ISTI Repository | doi.org | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS
2022
Contribution to book
Open Access
Big data analytics and Instagram: an exploratory study on Italian hotel accounts
Pianese T, Rossetti G, Morini V
A wealth of tourism-related data is available on the Internet, particularly on social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook and Instagram. Big data analytics (BDA) allows this large quantity of data to be processed, supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and gain an in-depth understanding of traveller preferences and behaviours. With regard to hotels, the analysis of data from SNSs provides countless actionable insights into customers'socio-demographic features, habits, daily trends and brand attitudes. This enables communication to be perfectly targeted, besides supplying valuable information to improve customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, the study of the implications of the automatic processing of data from SNSs in the hotel industry is still in its embryonic state. In order to demonstrate the utility of BDA to under-stand how hotels leverage SNSs, we conducted an exploratory study on the Instagram accounts - the photo-sharing SNS known worldwide - of eleven Italian hotels. To this end, the average sentiment score, the average length, lexical diversity and word clouds were calculated on textual data, collected with the instagrapi python package and pre-processed leveraging a standard NLP pipeline. These evidenced different stages of implementation of digital communication on SNSs, shorter text-based messages written on Instagram compared to other SNSs, and specific patterns of user engagement in hotel accounts. BDA also provides information about the online self-promotion process: hotel digital communication is clearly connected to destination, and hashtags are chosen to reach the desired community of travellers.Source: TOURISM STUDIES ON THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION, vol. 2, pp. 13-36
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Pianese T, Rossetti G, Morini V
A wealth of tourism-related data is available on the Internet, particularly on social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook and Instagram. Big data analytics (BDA) allows this large quantity of data to be processed, supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and gain an in-depth understanding of traveller preferences and behaviours. With regard to hotels, the analysis of data from SNSs provides countless actionable insights into customers'socio-demographic features, habits, daily trends and brand attitudes. This enables communication to be perfectly targeted, besides supplying valuable information to improve customer satisfaction. Nevertheless, the study of the implications of the automatic processing of data from SNSs in the hotel industry is still in its embryonic state. In order to demonstrate the utility of BDA to under-stand how hotels leverage SNSs, we conducted an exploratory study on the Instagram accounts - the photo-sharing SNS known worldwide - of eleven Italian hotels. To this end, the average sentiment score, the average length, lexical diversity and word clouds were calculated on textual data, collected with the instagrapi python package and pre-processed leveraging a standard NLP pipeline. These evidenced different stages of implementation of digital communication on SNSs, shorter text-based messages written on Instagram compared to other SNSs, and specific patterns of user engagement in hotel accounts. BDA also provides information about the online self-promotion process: hotel digital communication is clearly connected to destination, and hashtags are chosen to reach the desired community of travellers.Source: TOURISM STUDIES ON THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION, vol. 2, pp. 13-36
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
See at:
ISTI Repository | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS | CNR IRIS
2022
Other
Open Access
Humane-AI report microproject 2022
Morini V., Bellomo L., Ferragina P., Pedreschi D., Rossetti G.
The tangible objective of this micro-project was to develop a massive dataset for European News with a political leaning labeling. This was needed to tackle the next step of the project, which was the one of building a bias-minimizing recommender system for European news.The dataset comprehends millions of European news, and it has been enriched with metadata coming from Eurotopics.net. Each entry in the dataset contains the maintext, title, detected topic, publishment date, language, and news source together with news source metadata. This metadata comprehends the political leaning of the news source and its country.We then built an article bias classifier, in the attempt of predicting the political label of single articles using the labels obtained through distant supervision. We then applied explainable AI to our classifier and concluded that the classifier is effectively predicting the news source, rather than the political leaning.Project(s): HumanE-AI-Net
Morini V., Bellomo L., Ferragina P., Pedreschi D., Rossetti G.
The tangible objective of this micro-project was to develop a massive dataset for European News with a political leaning labeling. This was needed to tackle the next step of the project, which was the one of building a bias-minimizing recommender system for European news.The dataset comprehends millions of European news, and it has been enriched with metadata coming from Eurotopics.net. Each entry in the dataset contains the maintext, title, detected topic, publishment date, language, and news source together with news source metadata. This metadata comprehends the political leaning of the news source and its country.We then built an article bias classifier, in the attempt of predicting the political label of single articles using the labels obtained through distant supervision. We then applied explainable AI to our classifier and concluded that the classifier is effectively predicting the news source, rather than the political leaning.Project(s): HumanE-AI-Net
2021
Journal article
Open Access
UTLDR: an agent-based framework for modeling infectious diseases and public interventions
Rossetti G, Milli L, Citraro S, Morini V
Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, epidemic modeling is now experiencing a constantly growing interest from researchers of heterogeneous study fields. Indeed, due to such an increased attention, several software libraries and scientific tools have been developed to ease the access to epidemic modeling. However, only a handful of such resources were designed with the aim of providing a simple proxy for the study of the potential effects of public interventions (e.g., lockdown, testing, contact tracing). In this work, we introduce UTLDR, a framework that, overcoming such limitations, allows to generate "what if" epidemic scenarios incorporating several public interventions (and their combinations). UTLDR is designed to be easy to use and capable to leverage information provided by stratified populations of agents (e.g., age, gender, geographical allocation, and mobility patterns...). Moreover, the proposed framework is generic and not tailored for a specific epidemic phenomena: it aims to provide a qualitative support to understanding the effects of restrictions, rather than produce forecasts/explanation of specific data-driven phenomena.Source: JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
DOI: 10.1007/s10844-021-00649-6
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Rossetti G, Milli L, Citraro S, Morini V
Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, epidemic modeling is now experiencing a constantly growing interest from researchers of heterogeneous study fields. Indeed, due to such an increased attention, several software libraries and scientific tools have been developed to ease the access to epidemic modeling. However, only a handful of such resources were designed with the aim of providing a simple proxy for the study of the potential effects of public interventions (e.g., lockdown, testing, contact tracing). In this work, we introduce UTLDR, a framework that, overcoming such limitations, allows to generate "what if" epidemic scenarios incorporating several public interventions (and their combinations). UTLDR is designed to be easy to use and capable to leverage information provided by stratified populations of agents (e.g., age, gender, geographical allocation, and mobility patterns...). Moreover, the proposed framework is generic and not tailored for a specific epidemic phenomena: it aims to provide a qualitative support to understanding the effects of restrictions, rather than produce forecasts/explanation of specific data-driven phenomena.Source: JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
DOI: 10.1007/s10844-021-00649-6
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | link.springer.com | ISTI Repository | CNR IRIS
2021
Journal article
Open Access
Toward a standard approach for echo chamber detection: Reddit case study
Morini V, Pollacci L, Rossetti G
Featured Application: The framework proposed in this paper could be used to detect echo chambers in a standard way across multiple online social networks (i.e., leveraging features they commonly share). Such application then allows for comparative analysis between different platforms, thus discovering if some are more polarized than others. Further, a standard echo chamber characterization could be a starting point for designing a Recommendation System able to recognize and mitigate such a phenomenon. Abstract: In a digital environment, the term echo chamber refers to an alarming phenomenon in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal. Up to date, a formal definition, as well as a platform-independent approach for its detection, is still lacking. This paper proposes a general framework to identify echo chambers on online social networks built on top of features they commonly share. Our approach is based on a four-step pipeline that involves (i) the identification of a controversial issue; (ii) the inference of users' ideology on the controversy; (iii) the construction of users' debate network; and (iv) the detection of homogeneous meso-scale communities. We further apply our framework in a detailed case study on Reddit, covering the first two and a half years of Donald Trump's presidency. Our main purpose is to assess the existence of Pro-Trump and Anti-Trump echo chambers among three sociopolitical issues, as well as to analyze their stability and consistency over time. Even if users appear strongly polarized with respect to their ideology, most tend not to insulate themselves in echo chambers. However, the found polarized communities were proven to be definitely stable over time.Source: APPLIED SCIENCES, vol. 11 (issue 12)
DOI: 10.3390/app11125390
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
Morini V, Pollacci L, Rossetti G
Featured Application: The framework proposed in this paper could be used to detect echo chambers in a standard way across multiple online social networks (i.e., leveraging features they commonly share). Such application then allows for comparative analysis between different platforms, thus discovering if some are more polarized than others. Further, a standard echo chamber characterization could be a starting point for designing a Recommendation System able to recognize and mitigate such a phenomenon. Abstract: In a digital environment, the term echo chamber refers to an alarming phenomenon in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal. Up to date, a formal definition, as well as a platform-independent approach for its detection, is still lacking. This paper proposes a general framework to identify echo chambers on online social networks built on top of features they commonly share. Our approach is based on a four-step pipeline that involves (i) the identification of a controversial issue; (ii) the inference of users' ideology on the controversy; (iii) the construction of users' debate network; and (iv) the detection of homogeneous meso-scale communities. We further apply our framework in a detailed case study on Reddit, covering the first two and a half years of Donald Trump's presidency. Our main purpose is to assess the existence of Pro-Trump and Anti-Trump echo chambers among three sociopolitical issues, as well as to analyze their stability and consistency over time. Even if users appear strongly polarized with respect to their ideology, most tend not to insulate themselves in echo chambers. However, the found polarized communities were proven to be definitely stable over time.Source: APPLIED SCIENCES, vol. 11 (issue 12)
DOI: 10.3390/app11125390
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Metrics:
See at:
CNR IRIS | ISTI Repository | www.mdpi.com | CNR IRIS
2020
Conference article
Open Access
Capturing Political Polarization of Reddit Submissions in the Trump Era
Morini V, Pollacci L, Rossetti G
The American political situation of the last years, combined with the incredible growth of Social Networks, led to the diffusion of political polarization's phenomenon online. Our work presents a model that attempts to measure the political polarization of Reddit submissions during the first half of Donald Trump's presidency. To do so, we design a text classification task: Political polarization of submissions is assessed by quantifying those who align themselves with pro-Trump ideologies and vice versa. We build our ground truth by picking submissions from subreddits known to be strongly polarized. Then, for model selection, we use a Neural Network with word embeddings and Long Short Time Memory layer and, finally, we analyze how model performances change trying different hyper-parameters and types of embeddings.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 80-87. Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, June 21-24, 2020
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
Morini V, Pollacci L, Rossetti G
The American political situation of the last years, combined with the incredible growth of Social Networks, led to the diffusion of political polarization's phenomenon online. Our work presents a model that attempts to measure the political polarization of Reddit submissions during the first half of Donald Trump's presidency. To do so, we design a text classification task: Political polarization of submissions is assessed by quantifying those who align themselves with pro-Trump ideologies and vice versa. We build our ground truth by picking submissions from subreddits known to be strongly polarized. Then, for model selection, we use a Neural Network with word embeddings and Long Short Time Memory layer and, finally, we analyze how model performances change trying different hyper-parameters and types of embeddings.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 80-87. Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, June 21-24, 2020
Project(s): SoBigData-PlusPlus
See at:
ceur-ws.org | CNR IRIS | ISTI Repository | CNR IRIS