Commonsense reasoning can be seen as a process of identifying dependencies amongst events and actions. Understanding the circumstances surrounding these events requires background knowledge with sufficient breadth to cover a wide variety of domains. In the recent decades, there has been a lot of work in extracting commonsense knowledge, a number of these projects provide their collected data as semantic networks such as ConceptNet and CausalNet. In this thesis, we attempt to undertake the Choice Of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) challenge, a problem set with 1000 questions written in multiple-choice format with a premise and two alternative choices for each question. Our approach differs from previous work by using shortest paths between concepts in a causal graph with the edge weight as causality metric. We use CausalNet as primary network and implement a few design choices to explore the strengths and drawbacks of this approach, and propose an extension using ConceptNet by leveraging its commonsense knowledge base.
Current political issues are often reflected in social media discussions, gathering politicians and voters on common platforms. As these can affect the public perception of politics, the inner dynamics and backgrounds of such debates are of great scientific interest. This thesis takes user generated messages from an up-to-date dataset of considerable relevance as Time Series, and applies a topic-based analysis of inspiration and agenda setting to it. The Institute for Web Science and Technologies of the University Koblenz-Landau has collected Twitter data generated beforehand by candidates of the European Parliament Election 2019. This work processes and analyzes the dataset for various properties, while focusing on the influence of politicians and media on online debates. An algorithm to cluster tweets into topical threads is introduced. Subsequently, Sequential Association Rules are mined, yielding wide array of potential influence relations between both actors and topics. The elaborated methodology can be configured with different parameters and is extensible in functionality and scope of application.