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Title Detecting Polarized Topics Using Partisanship-aware Contextualized Topic Embeddings
Authors Zihao He, Negar Mokhberian, Antonio Câmara, Andrés Abeliuk, Kristina Lerman
Publication date 2021
Abstract Growing polarization of the news media has been blamed for
fanning disagreement, controversy and even violence. Early identification of
polarized topics is thus an urgent matter that can help mitigate conflict.
However, accurate measurement of topic-wise polarization is still an open
research challenge. To address this gap, we propose Partisanship-aware
Contextualized Topic Embeddings (PaCTE), a method to automatically detect
polarized topics from partisan news sources. Specifically, utilizing a
language model that has been finetuned on recognizing partisanship of the
news articles, we represent the ideology of a news corpus on a topic by
corpus-contextualized topic embedding and measure the polarization using
cosine distance. We apply our method to a dataset of news articles about the
COVID-19 pandemic. Extensive experiments on different news sources and
topics demonstrate the efficacy of our method to capture topical
polarization, as indicated by its effectiveness of retrieving the most
polarized topics.
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Pages 2102-2118
Conference name Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher Association for Computational Linguistic
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