Knowledge Graph Representation for Political Information Sources

Tinatin Osmonova, Alexey Tikhonov, Ivan P. Yamshchikov


Abstract
With the rise of computational social science, many scholars utilize data analysis and natural language processing tools to analyze social media, news articles, and other accessible data sources for examining political and social discourse. Particularly, the study of the emergence of echo-chambers due to the dissemination of specific information has become a topic of interest in mixed methods research areas. In this paper, we analyze data collected from two news portals, Breitbart News (BN) and New York Times (NYT) to prove the hypothesis that the formation of echo-chambers can be partially explained on the level of an individual information consumption rather than a collective topology of individuals’ social networks. Our research findings are presented through knowledge graphs, utilizing a dataset spanning 11.5 years gathered from BN and NYT media portals. We demonstrate that the application of knowledge representation techniques to the aforementioned news streams highlights, contrary to common assumptions, shows relative “internal” neutrality of both sources and polarizing attitude towards a small fraction of entities. Additionally, we argue that such characteristics in information sources lead to fundamental disparities in audience worldviews, potentially acting as a catalyst for the formation of echo-chambers.
Anthology ID:
2024.politicalnlp-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Haithem Afli, Houda Bouamor, Cristina Blasi Casagran, Sahar Ghannay
Venues:
PoliticalNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
45–54
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.politicalnlp-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tinatin Osmonova, Alexey Tikhonov, and Ivan P. Yamshchikov. 2024. Knowledge Graph Representation for Political Information Sources. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 45–54, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledge Graph Representation for Political Information Sources (Osmonova et al., PoliticalNLP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.politicalnlp-1.6.pdf