Abstract
Research shows that with the unexpected emergence of religion and faith, identifying religious conflicts within society has become an important problem for the government and law enforcement agencies. Many social science researchers and domain experts conduct manual surveys on offline and online bases for finding such conflicts. On the other hand, it is seen that people use social media websites for sharing their religious opinions, sentiments and beliefs. We create a hypothesis that social media websites are a rich source of information for mining these beliefs and automatically identifying the religious conflicts among users which overcomes the gaps of offline studies. In this paper, we address the challenge of ambiguity and multilingual scripts in social media posts and distinguish them into various religious sentiments of users. In order to evaluate our hypothesis, we conduct our study on Tumblr- the second most popular online micro-blogging service. We create a dataset of all Tumblr posts (published since 2007) consisting of several tags commonly used in religion based posts and make it publicly available for benchmarking and comparison. We investigate the efficiency of natural language based features for identifying the Tumblr posts that discuss about a religion and belong to one of the nine categories of users’ sentiments. For example, disagreement, defensive, annoyed and disappointment. We manually analyze these posts and our result shows the proposed features are discriminatory and support our hypothesis. Furthermore, our results reveal that despite the subjectivity in Tumblr posts, it is technically challenging to mine the religious sentiments of bloggers.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
References
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A.: A topical crawler for uncovering hidden communities of extremist micro-bloggers on Tumblr. In: 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts (MICROPOSTS) (2015)
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A.: But I did not mean it!- intent classification of racist posts on Tumblr. In: Proceedings of European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (EISIC), IEEE (2016)
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A.: Religious beliefs on social media: large dataset of Tumblr posts and bloggers consisting of religion based tags, mendeley data, v1, (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/8hp.39rknns.1
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A.: Spider and the flies: focused crawling on Tumblr to detect hate promoting communities. arXiv preprint (2016). arXiv:1603.09164
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A., Goyal, V.: Open source social media analytics for intelligence and security informatics applications. In: Kumar, N., Bhatnagar, V. (eds.) BDA 2015. LNCS, vol. 9498, pp. 21–37. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-27057-9_2
Bourlai, E., Herring, S.C.: Multimodal communication on Tumblr: I have so many feels! In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Web Science, ACM (2014)
Cohen, J.: Freedom of expression. Philos. Public Affairs 22(3), 207–263 (1993)
Kojetin, B.A., McIntosh, D.N., et al.: Quest: constructive search or religious conflict? J. Sci. Study Relig. 26, 111–115 (1987)
Maynard, D., Bontcheva, K., et al.: Challenges in developing opinion mining tools for social media. In: Proceedings of the@ NLP can u tag# usergeneratedcontent (2012)
Swinyard, W.R., Kau, A.K., Phua, H.Y.: Happiness, materialism, and religious experience in the US and Singapore. J. Happiness Stud. 2(1), 13–32 (2001)
Wilt, J.A., Grubbs, J.B., et al.: Anxiety predicts increases in struggles with religious/spiritual doubt over two weeks, one month, and one year. Int. J. Psychol. Relig. 1–9 (2016)
Yang, L.F., Ishak, M.S.A.: Framing interethnic conflict in malaysia: a comparative analysis of newspapers coverage on the hindu rights action force (HINDRAF). Int. J. Commun. 6, 24 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Agarwal, S., Sureka, A. (2017). A Collision of Beliefs: Investigating Linguistic Features for Religious Conflicts Identification on Tumblr. In: Krishnan, P., Radha Krishna, P., Parida, L. (eds) Distributed Computing and Internet Technology. ICDCIT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10109. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50472-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50472-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50471-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50472-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)