Social Support

Online social platforms serve a critical role for individuals as they seek to fill informational and emotional needs, from informational support like advice to emotional support like expressions of sympathy, frequently by interacting with others. The supportive replies of others help promote personal well-being, yet unsupportive replies can not only lead to distress but discourage online engagement altogether. In this work, we aim to study support in general - everyday interactions - drawing upon theories of how support is expressed in language. Our work is motivated by an agenda of promoting supportive online platforms where people can participate equally.

This task aims to measure whether pre-trained language models can understand supportive (and unsupportive) language uses. For example, the following utterance indicates supportiveness:

I was glad to contribute, thank you for coordinating it all.

The following indicates unsupportiveness:

Your responses have become too pathetic to even put *this* much effort into it. Goodbye, idiot.