We explore Debatepedia, a community-authored encyclopedia of sociopolitical de-bates, as evidence for inferring a low-dimensional, human-interpretable representa-tion in the domain of issues and positions. We introduce a generative model positing latent topics and cross-cutting positions that gives special treatment to person mentions and opin-ion words. We evaluate the resulting repre-sentation’s usefulness in attaching opinionated documents to arguments and its consistency with human judgments about positions.
