Learning Comment Controversy Prediction in Web Discussions Using Incidentally Supervised Multi-Task CNNs

Nils Rethmeier, Marc Hübner, Leonhard Hennig


Abstract
Comments on web news contain controversies that manifest as inter-group agreement-conflicts. Tracking such rapidly evolving controversy could ease conflict resolution or journalist-user interaction. However, this presupposes controversy online-prediction that scales to diverse domains using incidental supervision signals instead of manual labeling. To more deeply interpret comment-controversy model decisions we frame prediction as binary classification and evaluate baselines and multi-task CNNs that use an auxiliary news-genre-encoder. Finally, we use ablation and interpretability methods to determine the impacts of topic, discourse and sentiment indicators, contextual vs. global word influence, as well as genre-keywords vs. per-genre-controversy keywords – to find that the models learn plausible controversy features using only incidentally supervised signals.
Anthology ID:
W18-6246
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Alexandra Balahur, Saif M. Mohammad, Veronique Hoste, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
316–321
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6246
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6246
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nils Rethmeier, Marc Hübner, and Leonhard Hennig. 2018. Learning Comment Controversy Prediction in Web Discussions Using Incidentally Supervised Multi-Task CNNs. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 316–321, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Comment Controversy Prediction in Web Discussions Using Incidentally Supervised Multi-Task CNNs (Rethmeier et al., WASSA 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6246.pdf