Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity

Valentin Hofmann, Xiaowen Dong, Janet Pierrehumbert, Hinrich Schuetze


Abstract
The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network structure of online discussion forums, specifically Reddit, to detect polarized concepts. We model polarization along the dimensions of salience and framing, drawing upon insights from moral psychology. Our architecture combines graph neural networks with structured sparsity learning and results in representations for concepts and subreddits that capture temporal ideological dynamics such as right-wing and left-wing radicalization.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.41
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
536–550
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.41
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.41
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Valentin Hofmann, Xiaowen Dong, Janet Pierrehumbert, and Hinrich Schuetze. 2022. Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 536–550, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity (Hofmann et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.41.pdf
Software:
 2022.findings-naacl.41.software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.41.mp4
Code
 valentinhofmann/slap4slip
Data
Pushshift Reddit