Lolo Aboufoul


2021

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A Case Study of Analysis of Construals in Language on Social Media Surrounding a Crisis Event
Lolo Aboufoul | Khyati Mahajan | Tiffany Gallicano | Sara Levens | Samira Shaikh
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop

The events that took place at the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017 caused intense reaction on social media from users across the political spectrum. We present a novel application of psycholinguistics - specifically, construal level theory - to analyze the language on social media around this event of social import through topic models. We find that including psycholinguistic measures of concreteness as covariates in topic models can lead to informed analysis of the language surrounding an event of political import.