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QiBERT - Classifying Online Conversations

Messages with BERT as a Feature

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Technological Innovation for Connected Cyber Physical Spaces (DoCEIS 2023)

Part of the book series: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology ((IFIPAICT,volume 678))

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Abstract

Recent developments in online communication and their usage in everyday life have caused an explosion in the amount of a new genre of text data, short text. Thus, the need to classify this type of text based on its content has a significant implication in many areas. Online debates are no exception, once these provide access to information about opinions, positions and preferences of its users. This paper aims to use data obtained from online social conversations in Portuguese schools (short text) to observe behavioural trends and to see if students remain engaged in the discussion when stimulated. This project used the state of the art (SoA) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and methods, through BERT based models to classify if utterances are in or out of the debate subject. Using SBERT embeddings as a feature, with supervised learning, the proposed model achieved results above 0.95 average accuracy for classifying online messages. Such improvements can help social scientists better understand human communication, behaviour, discussion and persuasion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SBERT Model: paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2. Multi-lingual model of paraphrase-mpnet-base-v2, extended to 50 + languages.

    https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/paraphrase-mpnet-base-v2.

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Acknowledgment

This research was partially funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under Projects “Factors for promoting dialogue and healthy behaviours in online school communities” with reference DSAIPA/DS/0102/2019 and developed at the R&D Unit CICANT - Research Center for Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies, UIDB/04111/2020, UIDB/50008/2020 as well as Instituto Lusófono de Investigação e Desenvolvimento (ILIND) under Project COFAC/ILIND/COPELABS/1/2022.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. COPELABS, Universidade Lusófona, Campo Grande 376, 1749 - 024, Lisboa, Portugal

    Bruno D. Ferreira-Saraiva, Manuel Marques-Pita, João Pedro Matos-Carvalho & Zuil Pirola

  2. CICANT, Universidade Lusófona, Campo Grande 376, 1749 - 024, Lisboa, Portugal

    Bruno D. Ferreira-Saraiva, Manuel Marques-Pita, João Pedro Matos-Carvalho & Zuil Pirola

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  1. Bruno D. Ferreira-Saraiva
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  2. Manuel Marques-Pita
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  3. João Pedro Matos-Carvalho
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  4. Zuil Pirola
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruno D. Ferreira-Saraiva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon, Monte Caparica, Portugal

    Luis M. Camarinha-Matos

  2. School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon, Monte Caparica, Portugal

    Filipa Ferrada

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Ferreira-Saraiva, B.D., Marques-Pita, M., Matos-Carvalho, J.P., Pirola, Z. (2023). QiBERT - Classifying Online Conversations. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Ferrada, F. (eds) Technological Innovation for Connected Cyber Physical Spaces. DoCEIS 2023. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 678. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36007-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36007-7_16

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