Online social interactions have become so embedded in our societies that the thought of not having access to these social media might seem quite overwhelming. What makes social media most fascinating is that aside from connecting people globally and allowing their interactions in various formats, it provides a great natural social environment for a better understanding of humans’ individual and social functions.

 

The Social Science and Computational Lab at the University of Southern California is one of the many research labs that focuses on using the data collected from online platforms and AI to make sense of human language and morality. During my collaboration with the lab, I was involved in several qualitative and quantitative behavioral and NLP studies. One of the studies we published was the possible utilization of event extraction and multi-instance learning to detect under-reported criminal acts in cities for which the FBI has limited or no data. 

 

Some of the other studies that I was involved with included the collection of 35K tweets annotated for moral sentiments and studies focused on understanding people’s morality in their everyday lives or relative to their political ideologies, some of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. 

 

Hoover, J., Portillo-Wightman, G., Yeh, L., Havaldar, S., Mostafazadeh Davani, A., Lin, Y., … 

Dehghani, M. (2020). Moral Foundation Twitter Corpus: A Collection of 35k Tweets Annotated for Moral Sentiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619876629

 

Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Yeh, L., Atari, M., Kennedy, B. J., Gwenyth Portillo Wightman, Elaine 

Acosta González, Delong, N., Bhatia, R., Arineh Mirinjian, Ren, X., & Dehghani, M. (2019). 

Reporting the Unreported: Event Extraction for Analyzing the Local Representation of Hate Crimes. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-1580

 

Atari, M., Mehl, M. R., Graham, J., Doris, J. M., Schwarz, N., Davani, A. M., Omrani, A., 

Kennedy, B., Gonzalez, E., Jafarzadeh, N., Hussain, A., Mirinjian, A., Madden, A., Bhatia, R., Burch, A., Harlan, A., Sbarra, D. A., Raison, C. L., Moseley, S. A., … Dehghani, M. (2023). The paucity of morality in everyday talk. Scientific Reports, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32711-4