Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features

Jack Hessel, Lillian Lee


Abstract
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word “community” here is deliberate: what is controversial to some audiences may not be so to others. Using data from several different communities on reddit.com, we predict the ultimate controversiality of posts, leveraging features drawn from both the textual content and the tree structure of the early comments that initiate the discussion. We find that even when only a handful of comments are available, e.g., the first 5 comments made within 15 minutes of the original post, discussion features often add predictive capacity to strong content-and- rate only baselines. Additional experiments on domain transfer suggest that conversation- structure features often generalize to other communities better than conversation-content features do.
Anthology ID:
N19-1166
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1648–1659
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1166
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1166
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jack Hessel and Lillian Lee. 2019. Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1648–1659, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features (Hessel & Lee, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1166.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1166.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1166.mp4