Recognizing Stances in Ideological On-Line Debates

Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text, pages 116–124, Los Angeles, California, June 2010. c⃝2010 Association for Computational Linguistics Recognizing Stances in Ideological On-Line Debates Swapna Somasundaran Dept. of Computer Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 swapna@cs.pitt.edu Janyce Wiebe Dept. of Computer Science and The Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 wiebe@cs.pitt.edu Abstract This work explores the utility of sentiment and arguing opinions for classifying stances in ide- ological debates. In order to capture arguing opinions in ideological stance taking, we con- struct an arguing lexicon automatically from a manually annotated corpus. We build su- pervised systems employing sentiment and ar- guing opinions and their targets as features. Our systems perform substantially better than a distribution-based baseline. Additionally, by employing both types of opinion features, we are able to perform better than a unigram- based system. 1 Introduction In this work, we explore if and how ideologi- cal stances can be recognized using opinion analy- sis. Following (Somasundaran and Wiebe, 2009), stance, as used in this work, refers to an overall po- sition held by a person toward an object, idea or proposition. For example, in a debate “Do you be- lieve in the existence of God?,” a person may take a for-existence of God stance or an against existence of God stance. Similarly, being pro-choice, believ- ing in creationism, and supporting universal health- care are all examples of ideological stances. Online web forums discussing ideological and po- litical hot-topics are popular.1 In this work, we are 1http://www.opposingviews.com, http://wiki.idebate.org, http://www.createdebate.com and http://www.forandagainst.com are examples of such debating websites. interested in dual-sided debates (there are two pos- sible polarizing sides that the participants can take). For example, in a healthcare debate, participants can take a for-healthcare stance or an against-healthcare stance. Participants generally pick a side (the web- sites provide a way for users to tag their stance) and post an argument/justification supporting their stance. Personal opinions are clearly important in ideo- logical stance taking, and debate posts provide out- lets for expressing them. For instance, let us con- sider the following snippet from a universal health- care debate. Here the writer is expressing a nega- tive sentiment2 regarding the government (the opin- ion spans are highlighted in bold and their targets, what the opinions are about, are highlighted in ital- ics). (1) Government is a disease pretending to be its own cure. [side: against healthcare] The writer’s negative sentiment is directed toward the government, the initiator of universal healthcare. This negative opinion reveals his against-healthcare stance. We observed that arguing, a less well explored type of subjectivity, is prominently manifested in ideological debates. As used in this work, arguing is a type of linguistic subjectivity, where a person is ar- guing for or against something or expressing a belief about what is true, should be true or should be done 2As used in this work, sentiment is a type of linguistic sub- jectivity, specifically positive …

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