Publications by Andreas Oliver Spitz

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

ECCE: Entity-centric Corpus Exploration Using Contextual Implicit Networks

Maud Ehrmann, Matteo Romanello, Andreas Oliver Spitz

In the Digital Age, the analysis and exploration of unstructured document collections is of central importance to members of investigative professions, whether they might be scholars, journalists, paralegals, or analysts. In many of their domains, entities ...

ACM Digital Press2022

Quote Erat Demonstrandum: AWeb Interface for Exploring the Quotebank Corpus

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Huan-Cheng Chang, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Vuk Vukovic

The use of attributed quotes is the most direct and least filtered pathway of information propagation in news. Consequently, quotes play a central role in the conception, reception, and analysis of news stories. Since quotes provide a more direct window in ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

DeepNC: Deep Generative Network Completion

Andreas Oliver Spitz

Most network data are collected from partially observable networks with both missing nodes and missing edges, for example, due to limited resources and privacy settings specified by users on social media. Thus, it stands to reason that inferring the missin ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

Strong Heuristics for Named Entity Linking

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Marko Culjak

Named entity linking (NEL) in news is a challenging endeavour due to the frequency of unseen and emerging entities, which necessitates the use of unsupervised or zero-shot methods. However, such methods tend to come with caveats, such as no integration of ...

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2022

Quotebank: A Corpus of Quotations from a Decade of News

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz

We present Quotebank, an open corpus of 178 million quotations attributed to the speakers who uttered them, extracted from 162 million English news articles published between 2008 and 2020. In order to produce this Web-scale corpus, while at the same time ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Who Is Listening? Spokesperson Effect on Communicating Social and Physical Distancing Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

Effective communication during a pandemic, such as the current COVID-19 crisis, can save lives. At the present time, social and physical distancing measures are the lead strategy in combating the spread of COVID-19. In this study, a survey was administered ...

Frontiers Media2021

The effect of spokesperson attribution on public health message sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

It is urgent to understand how to effectively communicate public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work has focused on how to formulate messages in terms of style and content, rather than on who should send them. In particular, little ...

2021

Interventions for Softening Can Lead to Hardening of Opinions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Robert West, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Andreas Oliver Spitz

Motivated by the goal of designing interventions for softening polarized opinions on the Web, and building on results from psychology, we hypothesized that people would be moved more easily towards opposing opinions when the latter were voiced by a celebri ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021