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The growing importance of social media in conflicts and crises is accompanied by an ever-increasing research interest in the crisis informatics field in order to identify potential benefits and develop measures against the technology's abuse. This special issue sets out to give an overview of current research on the use of social media in conflicts and crises. In doing so, it focuses on both good and malicious aspects of social media and includes a variety of papers of conceptual, theoretical and empirical nature. In six sections, the special issue presents an overview of the field, analytical methods, technical challenges, current advancements and the accepted papers before concluding. Specific topics range from cyber deception over information trustworthiness to mining and near-real-time processing of social media data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study about communicability of conversational interfaces (namely chatbots) under a semiotic perspective. A chatbot is a software system that allows you to simulate real conversations between devices and users by means of a conversational interface (CI). After introducing the chatbot concept, focusing on its advantages and issues, we will present two domains of use in which chatbot interfaces can be effective: healthcare and smart home. For carrying out simple tasks such as finding information or triggering operations, users need an easy-to-use and to an easy-to-learn system to communicate with. To face this, conversational interfaces represent the latest trend in the field of digital design. For studying the communicability aspects of a CI, we carried out a user test to compare traditional and chatbot interfaces. This paper aims at evaluating the benefits at the communicability level of a chatbot in comparison to traditional GUI for incrementing the effectiveness and efficacy of communication between users and the system specifically for users with poor attitude in using technologies. In details, we evaluated the communicability of two prototypes that can be used to solve simple tasks in order to favour user inclusion, including everyone with very little exposure to technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]