Correlating Facts and Social Media Trends on Environmental Quantities Leveraging Commonsense Reasoning and Human Sentiments

Brad McNamee, Aparna Varde, Simon Razniewski


Abstract
As climate change alters the physical world we inhabit, opinions surrounding this hot-button issue continue to fluctuate. This is apparent on social media, particularly Twitter. In this paper, we explore concrete climate change data concerning the Air Quality Index (AQI), and its relationship to tweets. We incorporate commonsense connotations for appeal to the masses. Earlier work focuses primarily on accuracy and performance of sentiment analysis tools / models, much geared towards experts. We present commonsense interpretations of results, such that they are not impervious to the masses. Moreover, our study uses real data on multiple environmental quantities comprising AQI. We address human sentiments gathered from linked data on hashtagged tweets with geolocations. Tweets are analyzed using VADER, subtly entailing commonsense reasoning. Interestingly, correlations between climate change tweets and air quality data vary not only based upon the year, but also the specific environmental quantity. It is hoped that this study will shed light on possible areas to increase awareness of climate change, and methods to address it, by the scientists as well as the common public. In line with Linked Data initiatives, we aim to make this work openly accessible on a network, published with the Creative Commons license.
Anthology ID:
2022.salld-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Linked Data
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Ilan Kernerman, Sara Carvalho, Carlos A. Iglesias, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venue:
SALLD
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
25–30
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.salld-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brad McNamee, Aparna Varde, and Simon Razniewski. 2022. Correlating Facts and Social Media Trends on Environmental Quantities Leveraging Commonsense Reasoning and Human Sentiments. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Linked Data, pages 25–30, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Correlating Facts and Social Media Trends on Environmental Quantities Leveraging Commonsense Reasoning and Human Sentiments (McNamee et al., SALLD 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.salld-1.5.pdf