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Subjectivity, Polarity and the Aspect of Time in the Evolution of Crowd-Sourced Biographies

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Web Engineering (ICWE 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14629))

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Abstract

This study examines the use of subjective and sentimentally charged language in crowd-sourced articles by focusing on time and how articles in environments like Wikipedia tend to evolve as edits are made by multiple contributors. More specifically, we measure linguistic subjectivity (the systematic, asymmetrical use of language) using Mean Abstraction Level, an established subjectivity measure, and polarity (the use of positively or negatively sentimentally charged words) through time. For the latest case, we introduce a new measure called Polarity Density. We focus on Wikipedia biographies and their evolution over time and we perform a detailed analysis per gender and per personality category. Our empirical evaluation provides evidence of increased subjectivity in female biographies as per personality category and per gender, while the same also occurs when considering sentimental charge over time.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contents/Categories.

  3. 3.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies.

  4. 4.

    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki.

  5. 5.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/earwig/mwparserfromhell.

  7. 7.

    Dataset available at: https://github.com/unic-ailab/Subjectivity-Polarity-and-the-Aspect-of-Time-in-the-Evolution-of-Crowd-Sourced-Biographies.

  8. 8.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_with_the_most_appearances_at_Olympic_Games.

  9. 9.

    https://thebestschools.org/features/50-influential-scientists-world-today/.

  10. 10.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science.

  11. 11.

    https://deixto.com/didaxto/.

  12. 12.

    https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, School of Sciences and Engineering, University of Nicosia, 2417, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Constantinos Romantzis, Evangelos Mathioudis, Ioannis Katakis & Pantelis Agathangelou

  2. Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Alexandros Karakasidis

  3. Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Jahna Otterbacher

Authors
  1. Constantinos Romantzis
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  2. Alexandros Karakasidis
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  3. Evangelos Mathioudis
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  4. Ioannis Katakis
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  5. Pantelis Agathangelou
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  6. Jahna Otterbacher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandros Karakasidis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Kostas Stefanidis

  2. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Kari Systä

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Maristella Matera

  4. Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany

    Sebastian Heil

  5. University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece

    Haridimos Kondylakis

  6. University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Elisa Quintarelli

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Romantzis, C., Karakasidis, A., Mathioudis, E., Katakis, I., Agathangelou, P., Otterbacher, J. (2024). Subjectivity, Polarity and the Aspect of Time in the Evolution of Crowd-Sourced Biographies. In: Stefanidis, K., Systä, K., Matera, M., Heil, S., Kondylakis, H., Quintarelli, E. (eds) Web Engineering. ICWE 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14629. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62362-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62362-2_20

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