The effect of wording on message propagation: Topic- and author-controlled natural experiments on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’14).

“How does one make a message “successful”? Thisquestion is of interest to many entities, including political parties trying to frame an issue (Chong and Druckman, 2007), and individuals attempting to make a point in a group meeting. In the first case, an important type of success is achieved if the national conversation adopts the rhetoric of the party; in the latter case, if other group members repeat the originating individual’s point. The massive availability of online messages, such as posts to social media, now affords researchers new means to investigate at a very large scale the factors affecting message propagation, also known as adoption, sharing, spread, or virality.”