Directed Social Regard: Surfacing Targeted Advocacy, Opposition, Aid, Harms, and Victimization in Online Media

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Friedman, Scott, Wheelock, Ruta, Schmer-Galunder, Sonja, Iverson, Drisana, Vasilakes, Jake, Zheng, Joan, Rye, Jeffrey, Sarathy, Vasanth, Miller, Christopher
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Friedman, Scott
Wheelock, Ruta
Schmer-Galunder, Sonja
Iverson, Drisana
Vasilakes, Jake
Zheng, Joan
Rye, Jeffrey
Sarathy, Vasanth
Miller, Christopher
author_facet Friedman, Scott
Wheelock, Ruta
Schmer-Galunder, Sonja
Iverson, Drisana
Vasilakes, Jake
Zheng, Joan
Rye, Jeffrey
Sarathy, Vasanth
Miller, Christopher
contents The language in online platforms, influence operations, and political rhetoric frequently directs a mix of pro-social sentiment (e.g., advocacy, helpfulness, compassion) and anti-social sentiment (e.g., threats, opposition, blame) at different topics, all in the same message. While many natural language processing (NLP) tools classify or score a text's overall sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, these tools cannot report that positive and negative sentiments coexist, and they cannot report the target of those sentiments. This paper presents the Directed Social Regard (DSR) approach to multi-dimensional, multi-valence sentiment analysis, comprised of a pair of transformer-based models that (1) detects span-level targets of sentiment in a message and then (2) scores all spans within the message context along three (-1, 1) axes of regard that are motivated by social science theories of moral disengagement and moral framing. We present a data collection and annotation strategy for DSR dataset construction, a transformer-based architecture for span-level scoring, and a validation study with promising results. We apply the validated DSR model on six third-party datasets of online media and report meaningful correlations between DSR outputs and the labels and topics in these pre-existing social science datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Directed Social Regard: Surfacing Targeted Advocacy, Opposition, Aid, Harms, and Victimization in Online Media
Friedman, Scott
Wheelock, Ruta
Schmer-Galunder, Sonja
Iverson, Drisana
Vasilakes, Jake
Zheng, Joan
Rye, Jeffrey
Sarathy, Vasanth
Miller, Christopher
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The language in online platforms, influence operations, and political rhetoric frequently directs a mix of pro-social sentiment (e.g., advocacy, helpfulness, compassion) and anti-social sentiment (e.g., threats, opposition, blame) at different topics, all in the same message. While many natural language processing (NLP) tools classify or score a text's overall sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, these tools cannot report that positive and negative sentiments coexist, and they cannot report the target of those sentiments. This paper presents the Directed Social Regard (DSR) approach to multi-dimensional, multi-valence sentiment analysis, comprised of a pair of transformer-based models that (1) detects span-level targets of sentiment in a message and then (2) scores all spans within the message context along three (-1, 1) axes of regard that are motivated by social science theories of moral disengagement and moral framing. We present a data collection and annotation strategy for DSR dataset construction, a transformer-based architecture for span-level scoring, and a validation study with promising results. We apply the validated DSR model on six third-party datasets of online media and report meaningful correlations between DSR outputs and the labels and topics in these pre-existing social science datasets.
title Directed Social Regard: Surfacing Targeted Advocacy, Opposition, Aid, Harms, and Victimization in Online Media
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00776