Beyond Facts: 4th International Workshop on Computational Methods for Online Discourse Analysis

Expressing opinions and interacting with others on the Web has led to the production of an abundance of online discourse data, such as claims and viewpoints on controversial topics, their sources and contexts (events, entities). This data constitutes a valuable source of insights for studies into misinformation spread, bias reinforcement, echo chambers or political agenda setting. Computational methods, mostly from the field of NLP, have emerged that tackle a wide range of tasks in this context, including argument and opinion mining, claim detection, checkworthiness detection, stance detection or fact verification. However, computational models require robust definitions of classes and concepts under investigation. Thus, these computational tasks require a strong interdisciplinary and epistemological foundation, specifically with respect to the underlying definitions of key concepts such as claims, arguments, stances, check-worthiness or veracity. This requires a highly interdisciplinary approach combining expertise from fields such as communication studies, computational linguistics and computer science. As opposed to facts, claims are inherently more complex. Their interpretation strongly depends on the context and a variety of intentional or unintended meanings, where terminology and conceptual understandings strongly diverge across communities. From a computational perspective, in order to address this complexity, the synergy of multiple approaches, coming both from symbolic (knowledge representation) and statistical AI seem to be promising to tackle such challenges. This workshop aims at strengthening the relations between these communities, providing a forum for shared works on the modeling, extraction and analysis of discourse on the Web. It will address the need for a shared understanding and structured knowledge about discourse data in order to enable machine-interpretation, discoverability and reuse, in support of scientific or journalistic studies into the analysis of societal debates on the Web. Beyond research into information and knowledge extraction, data consolidation and modeling for knowledge graphs building, the workshop targets communities focusing on the analysis of online discourse, relying on methods from machine learning, natural language processing, large language models and Web data mining.