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Deep Feelings: A Massive Cross-Lingual Study on the Relation between Emotions and Virality

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive investigation on the relations between virality of news articles and the emotions they are found to evoke. Virality, in our view, is a phenomenon with many facets, i.e. under this generic term several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised. By exploiting a high-coverage and bilingual corpus of documents containing metrics of their spread on social networks as well as a massive affective annotation provided by readers, we present a thorough analysis of the interplay between evoked emotions and viral facets. We highlight and discuss our findings in light of a cross-lingual approach: while we discover differences in evoked emotions and corresponding viral effects, we provide preliminary evidence of a generalized explanatory model rooted in the deep structure of emotions: the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) circumplex. We find that viral facets appear to be consistently affected by particular VAD configurations, and these configurations indicate a clear connection with distinct phenomena underlying persuasive communication.

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  1. Deep Feelings: A Massive Cross-Lingual Study on the Relation between Emotions and Virality

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '15 Companion: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
    May 2015
    1602 pages
    ISBN:9781450334730
    DOI:10.1145/2740908

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    • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 18 May 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. crowdsourcing
    2. emotions
    3. social media
    4. virality

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    • Trento Rise
    • French National Agency for Research (ANR)
    • German Federal Ministry of Research and Education

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    • IW3C2

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    • (2024)Improving Fake News Detection with a Mixture of Experts: Leveraging Sentiment Analysis and Sarcasm Detection as Core Expert Models2024 6th International Conference on Advancements in Computing (ICAC)10.1109/ICAC64487.2024.10851056(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2024
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