13,111 research outputs found
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
Active learning in annotating micro-blogs dealing with e-reputation
Elections unleash strong political views on Twitter, but what do people
really think about politics? Opinion and trend mining on micro blogs dealing
with politics has recently attracted researchers in several fields including
Information Retrieval and Machine Learning (ML). Since the performance of ML
and Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches are limited by the amount and
quality of data available, one promising alternative for some tasks is the
automatic propagation of expert annotations. This paper intends to develop a
so-called active learning process for automatically annotating French language
tweets that deal with the image (i.e., representation, web reputation) of
politicians. Our main focus is on the methodology followed to build an original
annotated dataset expressing opinion from two French politicians over time. We
therefore review state of the art NLP-based ML algorithms to automatically
annotate tweets using a manual initiation step as bootstrap. This paper focuses
on key issues about active learning while building a large annotated data set
from noise. This will be introduced by human annotators, abundance of data and
the label distribution across data and entities. In turn, we show that Twitter
characteristics such as the author's name or hashtags can be considered as the
bearing point to not only improve automatic systems for Opinion Mining (OM) and
Topic Classification but also to reduce noise in human annotations. However, a
later thorough analysis shows that reducing noise might induce the loss of
crucial information.Comment: Journal of Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Issues in Science -
Vol 3 - Contextualisation digitale - 201
Identifying Users with Opposing Opinions in Twitter Debates
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively
used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of
tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that
this vast trove of data is tapped in order to gain insights into public opinion
especially on hotly contested issues such as abortion, gun reforms etc. Thus,
in our work, we aim to gauge users' stance on such topics in Twitter. We
propose ReLP, a semi-supervised framework using a retweet-based label
propagation algorithm coupled with a supervised classifier to identify users
with differing opinions. In particular, our framework is designed such that it
can be easily adopted to different domains with little human supervision while
still producing excellent accuracyComment: Corrected typos in Section 4, under "Visibly Opinionated Users". The
numbers did not add up. Results remain unchange
Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Polarization in Online Political Participatory Media
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological
stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that
manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical
analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online
platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by
creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as
the level of intra- party cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity,
finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to
party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer
of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow
topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the
layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of
2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through
metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social
resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is
related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two
parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party
system.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, Internet, Policy & Politics Conference,
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 25-26 September 201
SentiBench - a benchmark comparison of state-of-the-practice sentiment analysis methods
In the last few years thousands of scientific papers have investigated
sentiment analysis, several startups that measure opinions on real data have
emerged and a number of innovative products related to this theme have been
developed. There are multiple methods for measuring sentiments, including
lexical-based and supervised machine learning methods. Despite the vast
interest on the theme and wide popularity of some methods, it is unclear which
one is better for identifying the polarity (i.e., positive or negative) of a
message. Accordingly, there is a strong need to conduct a thorough
apple-to-apple comparison of sentiment analysis methods, \textit{as they are
used in practice}, across multiple datasets originated from different data
sources. Such a comparison is key for understanding the potential limitations,
advantages, and disadvantages of popular methods. This article aims at filling
this gap by presenting a benchmark comparison of twenty-four popular sentiment
analysis methods (which we call the state-of-the-practice methods). Our
evaluation is based on a benchmark of eighteen labeled datasets, covering
messages posted on social networks, movie and product reviews, as well as
opinions and comments in news articles. Our results highlight the extent to
which the prediction performance of these methods varies considerably across
datasets. Aiming at boosting the development of this research area, we open the
methods' codes and datasets used in this article, deploying them in a benchmark
system, which provides an open API for accessing and comparing sentence-level
sentiment analysis methods
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