Hierarchical viewpoint discovery from tweets using Bayesian modelling

Abstract

When users express their stances towards a topic in social media, they might elaborate their viewpoints or reasoning. Oftentimes, viewpoints expressed by different users exhibit a hierarchical structure. Therefore, detecting this kind of hierarchical viewpoints offers a better insight to understand the public opinion. In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian model for hierarchical viewpoint discovery from tweets. Driven by the motivation that a viewpoint expressed in a tweet can be regarded as a path from the root to a leaf of a hierarchical viewpoint tree, the assignment of the relevant viewpoint topics is assumed to follow two nested Chinese restaurant processes. Moreover, opinions in text are often expressed in un-semantically decomposable multi-terms or phrases, such as ‘economic recession’. Hence, a hierarchical Pitman–Yor process is employed as a prior for modelling the generation of phrases with arbitrary length. Experimental results on two Twitter corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Bayesian model for hierarchical viewpoint discovery.