Online social media are a perfect text source for stance analysis. Stance in human communication is concerned with speaker attitudes, beliefs, feelings and opinions. Expressions of stance are associated with the speakers' view of what they are talking about and what is up for discussion and negotiation in the intersubjective exchange. Taking stance is thus crucial for the social construction of meaning. Increased knowledge of stance can be useful for many application fields such as business intelligence, security analytics, or social media monitoring. In order to process large amounts of text data for stance analyses, linguists need interactive tools to explore the textual sources as well as the processed data based on computational linguistics techniques. Both original texts and derived data are important for refining the analyses iteratively. In this work, we present a visual analytics tool for online social media text data that can be used to open up the investigation of stance phenomena. Our approach complements traditional linguistic analysis techniques and is based on the analysis of utterances associated with two stance categories: sentiment and certainty. Our contributions include (1) the description of a novel web-based solution for analyzing the use and patterns of stance meanings and expressions in human communication over time; and (2) specialized techniques used for visualizing analysis provenance and corpus overview/navigation. We demonstrate our approach by means of text media on a highly controversial scandal with regard to expressions of anger and provide an expert review from linguists who have been using our tool.

A support vector classifier was compared to a lexicon-based approach for the task of detecting the stance categories speculation, contrast and conditional in English consumer reviews. Around 3,000 training instances were required to achieve a stable performance of an F-score of 90 for speculation. This outperformed the lexicon-based approach, for which an Fscore of just above 80 was achieved. The machine learning results for the other two categories showed a lower average (an approximate F-score of 60 for contrast and 70 for conditional), as well as a larger variance, and were only slightly better than lexicon matching. Therefore, while machine learning was successful for detecting speculation, a well-curated lexicon might be a more suitable approach for detecting contrast and conditional.

Our paper introduces a new initiative on a common computer program used as a cognitive tool that facilitates learning with as opposed to learning through technology. The tool, which comprises a modification of a so-called boilerplate, is part of a joint learning system (Kim and Reeves, 2007) in which the tool, learner and activity are equal participators in the learning process. Our focus is on teachers with limited technical expertise. The boilerplate is used as a learning tool specifically aimed at supporting graduate and post-graduate essay writing classes. Teachers have limited time to learn new computer programs and may avoid these because of limited technology skills and inexperience in this area. The cognitive tool assists students with structuring, formatting and grammar. In our presentation, we clarify the special features of the tool, and reflect on the philosophy behind it as well as on its potential for teachers in higher education.