Script-based story matching for cyberbullying prevention

While the Internet and social media help keep today's youth better connected to their friends, family, and community, the same media are also the form of expression for an array of harmful social behaviors, such as cyberbullying and cyber-harassment. In this paper we present work in progress to develop intelligent interfaces to social media that use commonsense knowledge bases and automated narrative analyses of text communications between users to trigger selective interventions and prevent negative outcomes. While other approaches seek merely to classify the overall topic of the text, we try to match stories to finer-grained ''scripts' that represent stereotypical events and actions. For example, many bullying stories can be matched to a ''revenge' script that describes trying to harm someone who has harmed you. These tools have been implemented in an initial prototype system and tested on a database of real stories of cyberbullying collected on MTV's ''A Thin Line' Web site.