Modeling Community Behavior through Semantic Analysis of Social Data: The Italian Hate Map Experience

Abstract

This paper presents the results of The Italian Hate Map, a research project aiming to monitor the level of intolerance of the Italian country by mining the content posted on social networks. Within the project, a pipeline of algorithms for data extraction, semantic processing, sentiment analysis and content classification has been defined to process huge amounts of Tweets and to build a map of the most at-risk areas, thus identifying the Italian communities tending to have a more intolerant behavior. The outcomes resulting from the analysis of the maps confirmed the insight that the adoption of semantic content analysis techniques can be very useful to create value from the rough content available on the Web, and to go one step further in understanding very complex phenomena by modeling offline behavior of the communities on the ground of their online behavior on social networks.