How Emotional and Contextual Annotations Involve in Sensemaking Processes of Foreign Language Social Media Posts

The goal of this paper is to investigate how computational tools to annotate communication can support multilingual sense-making on social media. We conducted a field study of SenseTrans, a browser extension that uses sentiment analysis and named entity extraction techniques to annotate Facebook posts with emotional and contextual information. Interviews with 18 participants who used SenseTrans in their Facebook newsfeed for two weeks suggest that the annotations often supported sensemaking by providing additional information they could use to get a quick gist of the posts or to supplement their own interpretations. Participants varied in the extent to which they were motivated to evaluate the credibility of and form mental models of how the annotations were generated, which shaped how they utilized the annotations for sensemaking. Our findings demonstrate the value of designing to support cross-lingual communication and inform design implications for intelligent tools that support communication and sensemaking.