Exploiting Social Network Structure for Person-to-Person Sentiment Analysis

Robert West, Hristo S. Paskov, Jure Leskovec, Christopher Potts


Abstract
Person-to-person evaluations are prevalent in all kinds of discourse and important for establishing reputations, building social bonds, and shaping public opinion. Such evaluations can be analyzed separately using signed social networks and textual sentiment analysis, but this misses the rich interactions between language and social context. To capture such interactions, we develop a model that predicts individual A’s opinion of individual B by synthesizing information from the signed social network in which A and B are embedded with sentiment analysis of the evaluative texts relating A to B. We prove that this problem is NP-hard but can be relaxed to an efficiently solvable hinge-loss Markov random field, and we show that this implementation outperforms text-only and network-only versions in two very different datasets involving community-level decision-making: the Wikipedia Requests for Adminship corpus and the Convote U.S. Congressional speech corpus.
Anthology ID:
Q14-1024
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 2
Month:
Year:
2014
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Dekang Lin, Michael Collins, Lillian Lee
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
297–310
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q14-1024
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00184
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert West, Hristo S. Paskov, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. 2014. Exploiting Social Network Structure for Person-to-Person Sentiment Analysis. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2:297–310.
Cite (Informal):
Exploiting Social Network Structure for Person-to-Person Sentiment Analysis (West et al., TACL 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q14-1024.pdf