Newspole : exposing political orientations of news stories by utilizing commenters’ sentiment patterns

Abstract

Political views frequently conflict in the coverage of contentious political issues, potentially causing serious social problems. As such it is important to attain awareness on conflicting political views. In this thesis, we present NewsPole exposing political orientations of news articles. NewsPole provides user-based service to build individual’s balanced reading and news-based service to give detail information about political orientation of news. We propose a novel social annotation analysis approach to identify political orientation of articles. It uncovers commenters’ sentiment patterns towards political news articles, and predicts the political orientation from the sentiments expressed in the comments. It takes advantage of commenters’ participation as well as their knowledge and intelligence condensed in the sentiment of comments, thereby greatly reduces the high complexity of political view identification.