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- Title
Using cocitation information to estimate political orientation in web documents.
- Authors
Efron, Miles
- Abstract
This paper introduces a simple method for estimating cultural orientation, 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 198 nonpartisan documents. Accuracy above 90% is obtained from the cocitation model, outperforming lexically based classifiers at statistically significant levels.
- Subjects
INFORMATION retrieval; HYPERTEXT systems; POLITICAL science; STATISTICS; INFORMATION services
- Publication
Knowledge & Information Systems, 2006, Vol 9, Issue 4, p492
- ISSN
0219-1377
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10115-005-0214-9