The DCCS student of the 2016 generation, Yerka Freire Vidal, recently presented at the Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB 2019), San Francisco, United States, her study on the characterization of attitudes on immigration in Chile “Characterization of Local Attitude towards Immigration using Social Media“, developed along with Eduardo Graells-Garrido from the Data Science Institute of the Faculty of Engineering, Universidad del Desarrollo.

Along with the PhD candidate, researchers from different Latin American countries also made presentations; Yerka was the first speaker of the Congress’ Technical Session I that took place this Tuesday, May 14. The document proposes the use of Twitter for the characterization of local attitudes towards immigration, with a case study on Chile. Through the use of semi-supervised topic models, it is possible to characterize immigration in two aspects: emotions and lexical categories relevant to each attitude, and the structure of the discussion network. The ideas presented are potential antecedents for the communication of policies and the design of interventions for the improvement of relations between groups.

The 10th Latin American Web Congress is one of a series of arbitrated international conferences that aim to provide a place to present, demonstrate and analyze the latest advances in web research involving the Latin American web community in its broadest sense. LA-WEB offers a place to show developed works (complete documents) and those ones at an early stage which may benefit from a peers analysis (brief documents). In this edition, LA-WEB was held in parallel to the Web Conference 2019 (May 13 to 17, also in San Francisco), in order to create an opportunity for a synergic environment between the Latin American community and the global community of web researchers leaders.

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