Revealing Contentious Concepts Across Social Groups

Ching-Sheng Lin, Zumrut Akcam, Samira Shaikh, Sharon Small, Ken Stahl, Tomek Strzalkowski, Nick Webb

Abstract
In this paper, a computational model based on concept polarity is proposed to investigate the influence of communications across the diacultural groups. The hypothesis of this work is that there are communities or groups which can be characterized by a network of concepts and the corresponding valuations of those concepts that are agreed upon by the members of the community. We apply an existing research tool, ECO, to generate text representative of each community and create community specific Valuation Concept Networks (VCN). We then compare VCNs across the communities, to attempt to find contentious concepts, which could subsequently be the focus of further exploration as points of contention between the two communities. A prototype, CPAM (Changing Positions, Altering Minds), was implemented as a proof of concept for this approach. The experiment was conducted using blog data from pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities. A potential application of this method and future work are discussed as well.
Anthology ID:
L12-1209
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2838–2841
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/403_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ching-Sheng Lin, Zumrut Akcam, Samira Shaikh, Sharon Small, Ken Stahl, Tomek Strzalkowski, and Nick Webb. 2012. Revealing Contentious Concepts Across Social Groups. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2838–2841, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Revealing Contentious Concepts Across Social Groups (Lin et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/403_Paper.pdf
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