Support Analysis of Weighted Discussions in Twitter

The analysis of opinions on social networks has recently received a considerable attention on many application fields. Although there exist many specialized and generalist social networks, nowadays Twitter is one of the most widely used when it comes to share and criticize relevant news, and the citizens response to news and events in Twitter is frequently taken as an indicator of the social interest for them. In order to understand what are the major accepted and rejected opinions in different domains by Twitter users, in a recent work we have developed an analysis system based on Valued Abstract Argumentation to model and reason about Twitter discussions under different schemes for weighting the tweet relevance. The argumentative model computes the set of socially accepted tweets in a discussion by taking the weight assigned to each tweet and the (possible) criticism between the discussion tweets. In this paper we propose to go one step further by considering the support between tweets and not only criticism between them. Our approach is not based on explicitly computing indirect attacks between tweets, but on the revaluation of the tweet relevance through the spread of the support tweet weights. In order to validate this new extension, we analyze different real Twitter discussions from the political domain and we compare the results with those obtained in a previous work, what allows us to evaluate how support relations can modify the accepted tweets.