While most of the existing research about online health information focuses exclusively on either the provider or the user side of communication circuits, this article aims to integrate and discuss both sides and their mediated relation to one another. Drawing on actor-network theory, it conceptualizes the provision and use of online health information as sociotechnical. It questions concretely...

As one of the world’s major social media hubs dedicated to online education during COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook mega-group Pandemic Pedagogy provides a panoramic perspective key concerns educators and students face amid public health crisis that forces redefinition what constitutes effective education. After several months instruction under pandemic conditions, two central themes emerged as most...

Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of "regular" Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to "build a better America" by constructing distributions with their ideal level ...

To improve the transparency of politics, the UK Parliament Debate archives have been published online for a long time. However there is still a lack of efficient way to deeply analysis the debate data. WhatTheySaid is an initiative to solve this problem by applying natural language processing and semantic Web technologies to enrich UK Parliament Debate archives and publish them as linked data. ...

Cognitive scientists are increasingly using online social media, such as blogging and Twitter, to gather information and disseminate opinion, while linking to primary articles and data. Because of this, internet tools are driving a change in the scientific process, where communication is characterised by rapid scientific discussion, wider access to specialist debates, and increased cross-discip...

Public debate functions as a forum for both expressing and forming opinions, an important aspect of public life. We present results for automatically classifying posts in online debate as to the position, or STANCE that the speaker takes on an issue, such as Pro or Con. We show that representing the dialogic structure of the debates in terms of agreement relations between speakers, greatly impr...

Social abstract argumentation laid theoretical foundations for future online debating systems with formal backbones and semantics. The advantage of these envisioned new systems is their capability of formally justifying the social outcomes of their debates. Many recent extensions proposed for argumentation in general have addressed the issue that not all attacks between arguments are equal, esp...

Blogs and forums are widely adopted by online communities to debate about various issues. However, a user that wants to cut in on a debate may experience some difficulties in extracting the current accepted positions, and can be discouraged from interacting through these applications. In our paper, we combine textual entailment with argumentation theory to automatically extract the arguments fr...