There are various SAR techniques that indicate whether an agent in a text is a social actor, including exclusion, backgrounding, individualism, assimilation, personalisation and impersonalisation, which will all be explored. Transitivity analysis-the examination of active and passive agents in texts-may uncover who is acting as the agent over whom and whether passive verbal constructions delete or mask social actors. This qualitative analysis is underpinned by Social Actor Representation (SAR), a branch of Social Action Theory (SAT), where grammatical and transitivity structures play a crucial role in the representation of social actors. However, due to the limitations of this approach-such as interpreting results and inconsistencies when comparing sentiment scores to human review -we build on this through the use of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

In particular, fear and anger were the most prominent emotions, whilst discussions around the government, teachers and statistics were taking place. Their analysis found sentiment fluctuated throughout the discourse, though was predominantly negative.

has examined Twitter discourses relating to decision-making algorithms-including the 2020 A Level algorithm through the use of computational linguistic approaches, including sentiment analysis, due to their popular use in analysing trending topic discussions on Twitter.

To date, one contribution by Heaton et al. Therefore, addressing this research gap could provide a fuller and more detailed picture of the wider public’s response to the event. Although initially defended, the algorithm-decided grades were abolished and teacher assessment grades were used instead due to an outpouring of public dismay.Īlthough work has been done on collecting public perspectives about the A Level algorithm, there is a research gap regarding public views expressed on Twitter, which could be a valuable source of data as it hosts a plethora of views relating to current affairs. A recent example of this is the case of the 2020 A Level algorithm in England and Wales, where examinations during the Covid-19 pandemic were replaced by automatically calculated grades. Although currently under-explored, studying this has shown to be important when forming interventions for when decision-making algorithms do not do their intended job. Methodologically, we demonstrated that CL and CDA complement existing NLP-based computational linguistic tools in researching the 2020 A Level algorithm however, there is further scope for how these approaches can be used in an iterative manner.īlame and agency in relation to automated decision-making is an emerging topic in academia. We discuss how this builds upon existing research where the algorithm is implicated and how such a wide range of constructions obscure blame. According to our results, students were found to have limited blame through the same analysis. Through analysing transitivity in this discourse, we found the algorithm itself, the UK government and Ofqual were all implicated as potentially responsible as social actors through active agency, agency metaphor possession and instances of passive constructions. We examined how blame was attributed to different entities who were presented as social actors or having social agency. Thus, we chose to complement this research by analysing 18,239 tweets relating to the A Level algorithm using Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), underpinned by social actor representation. While previous work used NLP-based opinion mining computational linguistic tools to analyse this discourse, shortcomings included accuracy issues, difficulties in interpretation and limited conclusions on who authors blamed. Views concerning who was to blame for this scandal were expressed on the social media website Twitter. After public outcry, teacher assessment grades used instead. Government officials initially stated that the algorithm was used to combat grade inflation. This algorithm factored in school attainment in each subject over the previous three years. In August 2020, the UK government and regulation body Ofqual replaced school examinations with automatically computed A Level grades in England and Wales.

Alliance defending dom twitter