Aligning Multidimensional Worldviews and Discovering Ideological Differences

Jeremiah Milbauer, Adarsh Mathew, James Evans


Abstract
The Internet is home to thousands of communities, each with their own unique worldview and associated ideological differences. With new communities constantly emerging and serving as ideological birthplaces, battlegrounds, and bunkers, it is critical to develop a framework for understanding worldviews and ideological distinction. Most existing work, however, takes a predetermined view based on political polarization: the “right vs. left” dichotomy of U.S. politics. In reality, both political polarization – and worldviews more broadly – transcend one-dimensional difference, and deserve a more complete analysis. Extending the ability of word embedding models to capture the semantic and cultural characteristics of their training corpora, we propose a novel method for discovering the multifaceted ideological and worldview characteristics of communities. Using over 1B comments collected from the largest communities on Reddit.com representing ~40% of Reddit activity, we demonstrate the efficacy of this approach to uncover complex ideological differences across multiple axes of polarization.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.396
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4832–4845
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.396
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.396
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jeremiah Milbauer, Adarsh Mathew, and James Evans. 2021. Aligning Multidimensional Worldviews and Discovering Ideological Differences. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4832–4845, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aligning Multidimensional Worldviews and Discovering Ideological Differences (Milbauer et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.396.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.396.mp4