Online discourse covers a wide range of topics and many actors tailor their content to impact online discussions through carefully crafted messages and targeted campaigns. Yet the scale and diversity of online media content make it difficult to evaluate the impact of a particular message. In this paper, we present a new technique that leverages semantic similarity to quantify the change in the discussion after a particular message has been published. We use a set of press releases from environmental organisations and tweets from the climate change debate to show that our novel approach reveals a heavy-tailed distribution of response in online discourse to strategic communications.

翻译：在线话语覆盖了广泛的主题，许多参与者通过精心制作的信息和有针对性的活动，影响在线讨论。然而，在线媒体内容的规模和多样性使得难以评估特定信息的影响。在本文中，我们提出了一种利用语义相似性量化特定信息发布后讨论变化的新技术。我们使用来自环境组织的一组新闻稿和来自气候变化辩论的推文来显示，我们的新方法揭示了在线讨论对战略传播的回应呈重尾分布。