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We collect a corpus of 1554 online news articles from 23 RSS feeds and analyze it in terms of controversy and sentiment. We use several existing sentiment lexicons and lists of controversial terms to perform a number of statistical analyses that explore how sentiment and controversy are related. We conclude that the negative sentiment and controversy are not necessarily positively correlated as has been claimed in the past. In addition, we apply an information theoretic approach and suggest that entropy might be a good predictor of controversy.
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Unsupervised Explainable Controversy Detection from Online News
Alerting users that a web page is controversial has been proposed as one method to support critical thinking about text and discourse. We propose an approach to discover controversial topics in a generic document using unsupervised training. Our approach comprises iterative training of a controversy classifier using a disagreement signal within comments and explaining the controversy of the document by generating a topic phrase describing it. Experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed training method using an EM algorithm. When controversial topic extraction is restricted to quality phrases and incorporates TextRank signals, it outperforms several baseline approaches.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813662
- PAR ID:
- 10110147
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 836-843
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15712-8_60
