Directed Social Regard: Surfacing Targeted Advocacy, Opposition, Aid, Harms, and Victimization in Online Media

ArXi:2605.00776v1 Announce Type: cross The language in online platforms, influence operations, and political rhetoric frequently directs a mix of pro-social sentiment (e.g., advocacy, helpfulness, compassion) and anti-social sentiment (e.g., threats, opposition, blame) at different topics, all in the same message. While many natural language processing (NLP) tools classify or score a text's overall sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, these tools cannot report that positive and negative sentiments coexist, and they cannot report the target of those sentiments.