A topic enhanced approach to detecting multiple standpoints in web texts

Abstract

Internet has become the most popular platform for people to exchange opinions and express stances. The stances implied in web texts indicate people's fundamental beliefs and viewpoints. Understanding the stances people take is beneficial and critical for many security and business related applications, such as policy design, emergency response and marketing management. Most previous work on stance detection focuses on identifying the supportive or unsupportive attitudes towards a specific target. However, another important type of stance detection, i.e. multiple standpoint detection, has been largely ignored. Multiple standpoint detection aims to identify the distinct standpoints people hold among multiple parties, which reflects people's intrinsic values and judgments. When expressing standpoints, people tend to discuss diverse topics, and the word usage in the topics of different standpoints often varies a lot. As topics can provide latent information for identifying various standpoints, in this paper, we propose a topic-based approach to detecting multiple standpoints in Web texts, by enhancing generative classification model as well as feature representation of texts. In addition, we develop an adaptive process to determine parameter values in our approach automatically. Experimental studies on several real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach in detecting multiple standpoints.