This article uses data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science to map and analyse the scientific landscape for synthetic biology. The article draws on recent advances in data visualisation and analytics with the aim of informing upcoming international policy debates on the governance of synthetic biology by the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) of the United...

Online users tend to select claims that adhere to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias, indeed, plays a pivotal role in viral phenomena. Furthermore, the wide availability of content on the web fosters the aggregation of likeminded people where debates tend to enforce group polarization. Such a configuration might alter the public debate and thus the f...

Social media platforms have enabled people to freely express their views and discuss issues of interest with others. While it is important to discover the topics in discussions, it is equally useful to mine the nature of such discussions or debates and the behavior of the participants. There are many questions that can be asked. One key question is whether the participants give reasoned argumen...

Argument extraction and analysis in online content has gained significant interest in the past few years. The amount of information on the web increases daily with an increasing portion of information and opinion exchange occurring in online interactions on social media. Suitably mined and analysed, it could provide a lot of insight into the beliefs and reasoning of people about problems that a...

Identifying the main claims occurring across texts is important for large-scale argumentation mining from social media. However, the claims that users make are often unclear and build on implicit knowledge, effectively introducing a gap between the claims. In this work, we study the problem of matching user claims to predefined main claims, using implicit premises to fill the gap. We build a da...

Online debate forums provide a powerful communication platform for individual users to share information, exchange ideas and express opinions on a variety of topics. Understanding people’s opinions in such forums is an important task as its results can be used in many ways. It is, however, a challenging task because of the informal language use and the dynamic nature of online conversations. In...

We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Speci cally, we explore how the structure of interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective attention, as evidenced by the number of users discussing a topic. Spikes in the volume of users typically correspond to external events that increase the public attention on...

There has been much research done on online learning including research on online educational activities and methods. The use of technology is gaining rising importance in higher education due to the benefits that it brings. In terms of adopting new technologies to teaching, new forms of teaching, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), are increasingly seen as a feasible future form of le...

Some Internet genres, in particular Weblogs and discussion fora, have a dubious reputation for giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech. This paper investigates the use of dehumanizing metaphors, specifically parasite metaphors, in British debates about immigration. It compares the range of metaphors used in Blogs with that used in online fora and in mainstream newspaper cov...