A system for intergroup prejudice detection: The case of microblogging under terrorist attacks

• Main Authors: Dutta, H. (Author), Kwon, K.H (Author), Rao, H.R (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V. 2018
• Subjects: Automated detection; Classification (of information); Detection system; Digital storage; Intergroup prejudice detection system; Knowledge discovery framework; Learning systems; Linguistic features; Linguistics; Logistic regression with regularization; Logistic regressions; Machine learning; Social media platforms; Social media text classification; Social networking (online); Terrorist attacks; Text classification; Text processing
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher
• ISBN: 01679236 (ISSN)
• DOI: 10.1016/j.dss.2018.06.003

Intergroup prejudice is a distorted opinion held by one social group about another, without examination of facts. It is heightened during crises or threat. It finds expression in social media platforms when a group of people express anger, resentment and dissent towards another. This paper presents a system for automated detection of prejudiced messages from social media feeds. It uses a knowledge discovery framework that preprocesses data, generates theory-driven linguistic features along with other features engineered from textual content, annotates and models historical data to determine what drives detection of intergroup prejudice especially during a crisis. It is tested on tweets collected during the Boston Marathon bombing event. The system can be used to curb abuse and harassment by timely detection and reporting of intergroup prejudice. © 2018