Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?

Urban legends are a genre of modern folklore, consisting of stories about rare and exceptional events, just plausible enough to be believed, which tend to propagate inexorably across communities. In our view, while urban legends represent a form of "sticky" deceptive text, they are marked by a tension between the credible and incredible. They should be credible like a news article and incredible like a fairy tale to go viral. In particular we will focus on the idea that urban legends should mimic the details of news (who, where, when) to be credible, while they should be emotional and readable like a fairy tale to be catchy and memorable. Using NLP tools we will provide a quantitative analysis of these prototypical characteristics. We also lay out some machine learning experiments showing that it is possible to recognize an urban legend using just these simple features.

Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion.

Ecological Evaluation of Persuasive Messages Using Google AdWords

In recent years there has been a growing interest in crowdsourcing methodologies to be used in experimental research for NLP tasks. In particular, evaluation of systems and theories about persuasion is difficult to accommodate within existing frameworks. In this paper we present a new cheap and fast methodology that allows fast experiment building and evaluation with fully-automated analysis at a low cost. The central idea is exploiting existing commercial tools for advertising on the web, such as Google AdWords, to measure message impact in an ecological setting. The paper includes a description of the approach, tips for how to use AdWords for scientific research, and results of pilot experiments on the impact of affective text variations which confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

Exploring Text Virality in Social Networks

This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being spread, rather than to the influencers who spread it, (b) virality is a phenomenon with many facets, i.e. under this generic term several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised and they only partially overlap. To give ground to our claims, we provide initial experiments in a machine learning framework to show how various aspects of virality can be independently predicted according to content features.