Weighted argumentation for analysis of discussions in twitter

Twitter has become a widely used social network to discuss ideas about many domains. This leads to a growing interest in understanding what are the major accepted or rejected opinions in different domains by social network users. At the same time, checking what are the topics that produce the most c...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Alsinet, Teresa, Argelich Romà, Josep, Béjar Torres, Ramón, Fernàndez Camon, César, Mateu Piñol, Carles, Planes Cid, Jordi
Format: article
Status:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Publication Date:2017
Country:España
Institution:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repository:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/59372
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijar.2017.02.004
http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/59372
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Abstract argumentation
Weighted arguments
Semantic attacks
Discussions in Twitter
Description
Summary:Twitter has become a widely used social network to discuss ideas about many domains. This leads to a growing interest in understanding what are the major accepted or rejected opinions in different domains by social network users. At the same time, checking what are the topics that produce the most controversial discussions among users can be a good tool to discover topics that can be divisive, what can be useful, e.g., for policy makers. With the aim to automatically discover such information from Twitter discussions, we present an analysis system based on Valued Abstract Argumentation to model and reason about the accepted and rejected opinions. We consider different schemes to weight the opinions of Twitter users, such that we can tune the relevance of opinions considering different information sources from the social network. Towards having a fully automatic system, we also design a relation labeling system for discovering the relation between opinions. Regarding the underlying acceptability semantics, we use ideal semantics to compute accepted/rejected opinions. We define two measures over sets of accepted and rejected opinions to quantify the most controversial discussions. In order to validate our system, we analyze different real Twitter discussions from the political domain. The results show that different weighting schemes produce different sets of socially accepted opinions and that the controversy measures can reveal significant differences between discussions.