78,270 research outputs found
Topic-Specific Sentiment Analysis Can Help Identify Political Ideology
Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment
one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that
represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities
towards a set of topics. This representation can then be used to detect
ideological leanings of documents (speeches, news articles, etc.) based on the
sentiments expressed towards different topics. Experiments performed using a
widely used dataset show the promise of our proposed approach that achieves
comparable performance to other methods despite being much simpler and more
interpretable.Comment: Presented at EMNLP Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, 201
Computational Controversy
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by
fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have
been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently,
various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using
new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these
phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such
debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of
the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to
link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is
both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same
time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead
to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the
crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social
Informatics (SocInfo) 201
Machine Learning meets Data-Driven Journalism: Boosting International Understanding and Transparency in News Coverage
Migration crisis, climate change or tax havens: Global challenges need global
solutions. But agreeing on a joint approach is difficult without a common
ground for discussion. Public spheres are highly segmented because news are
mainly produced and received on a national level. Gain- ing a global view on
international debates about important issues is hindered by the enormous
quantity of news and by language barriers. Media analysis usually focuses only
on qualitative re- search. In this position statement, we argue that it is
imperative to pool methods from machine learning, journalism studies and
statistics to help bridging the segmented data of the international public
sphere, using the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a
case study.Comment: presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in
Social Good Applications, New York, N
Viewpoint Discovery and Understanding in Social Networks
The Web has evolved to a dominant platform where everyone has the opportunity
to express their opinions, to interact with other users, and to debate on
emerging events happening around the world. On the one hand, this has enabled
the presence of different viewpoints and opinions about a - usually
controversial - topic (like Brexit), but at the same time, it has led to
phenomena like media bias, echo chambers and filter bubbles, where users are
exposed to only one point of view on the same topic. Therefore, there is the
need for methods that are able to detect and explain the different viewpoints.
In this paper, we propose a graph partitioning method that exploits social
interactions to enable the discovery of different communities (representing
different viewpoints) discussing about a controversial topic in a social
network like Twitter. To explain the discovered viewpoints, we describe a
method, called Iterative Rank Difference (IRD), which allows detecting
descriptive terms that characterize the different viewpoints as well as
understanding how a specific term is related to a viewpoint (by detecting other
related descriptive terms). The results of an experimental evaluation showed
that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on viewpoint discovery,
while a qualitative analysis of the proposed IRD method on three different
controversial topics showed that IRD provides comprehensive and deep
representations of the different viewpoints
Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse
The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational
linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation.
In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal
with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of
registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web
discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and
argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation
model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold
standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several
machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data,
source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses.
Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is
a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in
User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17
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