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The liberal media and right-wing conspiracies: using cocitation information to estimate political orientation in web documents

Published: 13 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces a simple method for estimating <i>cultural orientation</i>, the affiliation of online entities in a polarized field of discourse. In particular, cocitation information is used to estimate the political orientation of hypertext documents. A type of cultural orientation, the political orientation of a document is the degree to which it participates in traditionally left- or right-wing beliefs. Estimating documents' political orientation is of interest for personalized information retrieval and recommender systems. In its application to politics, the method uses a simple probabilistic model to estimate the strength of association between a document and left- and right-wing communities. The model estimates the likelihood of cocitation between a document of interest and a small number of documents of known orientation. The model is tested on three sets of data, 695 partisan web documents, 162 political weblogs, and 72 non-partisan documents. Accuracy above 90% is obtained from the cocitation model, outperforming lexically based classifiers at statistically significant levels.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CIKM '04: Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
        November 2004
        678 pages
        ISBN:1581138741
        DOI:10.1145/1031171
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        Published: 13 November 2004

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        Author Tags

        1. PMI-IR
        2. cocitation
        3. cultural orientation
        4. opinion mining
        5. personalization
        6. politics

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        November 8 - 13, 2004
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        • (2019)A Link-based Approach to Detect Media Bias in News WebsitesCompanion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308560.3316460(742-745)Online publication date: 13-May-2019
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