Hannah Metzler

Segun Taofeek Aroyehun, Lukas Malik, Hannah Metzler et al.

The wealth of text data generated by social media has enabled new kinds of analysis of emotions with language models. These models are often trained on small and costly datasets of text annotations produced by readers who guess the emotions expressed by others in social media posts. This affects the quality of emotion identification methods due to training data size limitations and noise in the production of labels used in model development. We present LEIA, a model for emotion identification in text that has been trained on a dataset of more than 6 million posts with self-annotated emotion labels for happiness, affection, sadness, anger, and fear. LEIA is based on a word masking method that enhances the learning of emotion words during model pre-training. LEIA achieves macro-F1 values of approximately 73 on three in-domain test datasets, outperforming other supervised and unsupervised methods in a strong benchmark that shows that LEIA generalizes across posts, users, and time periods. We further perform an out-of-domain evaluation on five different datasets of social media and other sources, showing LEIA's robust performance across media, data collection methods, and annotation schemes. Our results show that LEIA generalizes its classification of anger, happiness, and sadness beyond the domain it was trained on. LEIA can be applied in future research to provide better identification of emotions in text from the perspective of the writer. The models produced for this article are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/LEIA

Azza Bouleimen, Giordano De Marzo, Taehee Kim et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new avenues to simulate online communities and social media. Potential applications range from testing the design of content recommendation algorithms to estimating the effects of content policies and interventions. However, the validity of using LLMs to simulate conversations between various users remains largely untested. We evaluated whether LLMs can convincingly mimic human group conversations on social media. We collected authentic human conversations from Reddit and generated artificial conversations on the same topic with two LLMs: Llama 3 70B and GPT-4o. When presented side-by-side to study participants, LLM-generated conversations were mistaken for human-created content 39\% of the time. In particular, when evaluating conversations generated by Llama 3, participants correctly identified them as AI-generated only 56\% of the time, barely better than random chance. Our study demonstrates that LLMs can generate social media conversations sufficiently realistic to deceive humans when reading them, highlighting both a promising potential for social simulation and a warning message about the potential misuse of LLMs to generate new inauthentic social media content.

Hannah Metzler, Hubert Baginski, Thomas Niederkrotenthaler et al.

Research shows that exposure to suicide-related news media content is associated with suicide rates, with some content characteristics likely having harmful and others potentially protective effects. Although good evidence exists for a few selected characteristics, systematic large scale investigations are missing in general, and in particular for social media data. We apply machine learning methods to classify large quantities of Twitter data according to a novel annotation scheme that distinguishes 12 categories of suicide-related tweets. We then trained a benchmark of machine learning models including a majority classifier, an approach based on word frequency (TF-IDF with a linear SVM) and two state-of-the-art deep learning models (BERT, XLNet). The two deep learning models achieved the best performance in two classification tasks: In the first task, we classified six main content categories, including personal stories about either suicidal ideation and attempts or coping, calls for action intending to spread either problem awareness or prevention-related information, reporting of suicide cases, and other tweets irrelevant to these categories. The deep learning models reached accuracy scores above 73% on average across the six categories, and F1-scores in between 0.70 and 0.85 for all but the suicidal ideation and attempts category (0.51-0.55). In the second task, separating tweets referring to actual suicide from off-topic tweets, they correctly labeled around 88% of tweets, with BERT achieving F1-scores of 0.93 and 0.74 for the two categories, respectively. These classification performances are comparable to the state-of-the-art on similar tasks. By making data labeling more efficient, this work has enabled large-scale investigations on harmful and protective associations of social media content with suicide rates and help-seeking behavior.

Max Pellert, Jana Lasser, Hannah Metzler et al.

To track online emotional expressions of the Austrian population close to real-time during the COVID-19 pandemic, we build a self-updating monitor of emotion dynamics using digital traces from three different data sources. This enables decision makers and the interested public to assess issues such as the attitude towards counter-measures taken during the pandemic and the possible emergence of a (mental) health crisis early on. We use web scraping and API access to retrieve data from the news platform derstandard.at, Twitter and a chat platform for students. We document the technical details of our workflow in order to provide materials for other researchers interested in building a similar tool for different contexts. Automated text analysis allows us to highlight changes of language use during COVID-19 in comparison to a neutral baseline. We use special word clouds to visualize that overall difference. Longitudinally, our time series show spikes in anxiety that can be linked to several events and media reporting. Additionally, we find a marked decrease in anger. The changes last for remarkably long periods of time (up to 12 weeks). We discuss these and more patterns and connect them to the emergence of collective emotions. The interactive dashboard showcasing our data is available online under http://www.mpellert.at/covid19_monitor_austria/. Our work has attracted media attention and is part of an web archive of resources on COVID-19 collected by the Austrian National Library.