Creating a More Transparent Internet (Studies in Natural Language Processing)

On social media, new forms of communication arise rapidly, many of which are intense, dispersed, and create new communities at a global scale. Such communities can act as distinct information bubbles with their own perspective on the world, and it is difficult for people to find and monitor all these perspectives and relate the different claims made. Within this digital jungle of perspectives on truth, it is difficult to make informed decisions on important things like vaccinations, democracy, and climate change. Understanding and modeling this phenomenon in its full complexity requires an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing the ample data provided by digital communication to offer new insights and opportunities. This interdisciplinary book gives a comprehensive view on social media communication, the different forms it takes, the impact and the technology used to mine it, and defines the roadmap to a more transparent Web.

Piek Vossen is Professor in Computational Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is co-founder and president of the Global Wordnet Association and received the Dutch Spinoza-prize in 2013 for his research. He used this prize for projects on language understanding, including mining perspectives in debates like on vaccination.

Antske Fokkens is Professor in Computational Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and Associate Professor at the Applied Geometric Algorithms group at the Technical University Eindhoven. Since 2021, she has acted as University Research Chair on methodological aspects of computational linguistics, in particular when used in an interdisciplinary setting.