Word-Level Political Sentiments Inferred From Social Media and Application in Recommendation Diversification

Abstract

Political polarization is commonly observed in democratic countries. While it allows individual citizens to freely choose sides, it also causes the problem of separation and isolation. Especially in information-seeking behaviors, echo chambers and filter bubbles are observed. In this paper, we present a political sentiment dictionary for analyzing political polarization and increasing information heterogeneity. It takes advantage of large-scale social media data and is thus superior in accuracy and coverage compared to manually crafted dictionaries. Generated from Japanese tweets, more than 50k words in this dictionary cover aspects ranging from political parties and public entities to foods and personal hobbies. We describe in detail the method to construct this dictionary, which can be replicated for other languages and countries. We demonstrate the use of this dictionary in the application of recommendation diversification. We show with real-world e-commerce data that the use of the dictionary can generally increase the diversity in product recommendations, effectively mitigating the filter bubbles.