Associate Professor Derry Wijaya Won Best Paper Award at the 4th Workshop of NLP for Positive Impact
Dr. Derry Wijaya, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Master of Data Science Program
Vienna, Austria – Associate Professor Derry Wijaya has won Best Paper at the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Positive Impact, held at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) in Vienna, Austria, on 31 July 2025. The winning paper "Insights into Climate Change Narratives: Emotional Alignment and Engagement Analysis on TikTok" was written collaboratively with Ge Gao (GRS '27), Zhengyang Shan (CDS '27), James Crissman (COM '28), Ekaterina Novozhilova (COM '26), YuCheng Huang (GRS '24), Arti Ramanathan (COM '25), and Prof. Margrit Betke from Boston University, USA.
In their cross-disciplinary study, Associate Professor Derry Wijaya and team look at how TikTok videos about climate change influence people's emotions and how those emotions affect engagement (likes, shares, and comments). By analysing over 7,000 videos, the researchers found two big takeaways. First, videos with facts and strong visuals (like striking images of the environment), as well as those with positive or clear emotional tones, tend to connect better emotionally with viewers. They also get more engagement when the speaker's tone is consistent and emotionally intense.
Certificate of Appreciation for the Best Paper Award
Second, audience comments matter a lot: the emotions expressed in comments—whether positive or negative—strongly predict whether a video gets shared widely. Moreover, while content-related features primarily influence initial shareability, audience emotional responses, as expressed through comments, become increasingly pivotal in shaping engagement as it grows. Unlike video content, comments are dynamic discussions where emotions can influence subsequent comments and elicit further emotions. This highlights TikTok's role as a social platform where engagement is driven by user interactions than by the informational content of the videos, despite its growing popularity as a place to seek information.
In summary, the way creators present climate content and the emotions sparked in comments both play a major role in how far these messages spread on TikTok. These insights can inform content design and offer a framework for optimizing climate change communication to effectively engage and mobilize users for action.
The paper was presented at the 4th Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact. This workshop is a place to discuss and publish research works that empower current advances of NLP and AI for various social impacts, like addressing pressing global challenges, poverty, hunger, healthcare, education, inequality, and climate change. The workshop also fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, encouraging submissions that bridge NLP with fields like social science, journalism, economics, HCI, and NGOs of different domains.
Congratulations to our Associate Professor Derry Wijaya and all co-authors for this wonderful recognition of their impactful work!
Access "Insights into Climate Change Narratives: Emotional Alignment and Engagement Analysis on TikTok" paper here: https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlp4pi-1.11/