OpinioNetIt: Understanding the Opinions-People network for politically controversial topics

Abstract

The wikileaks documents or the economic crises in Ireland and Portugal are some of the controversial topics being played on the news everyday. Each of these topics has many different aspects, and there is no absolute, simple truth in answering questions such as: should the EU guarantee the financial stability of each member country, or should the countries themselves be solely responsible? To understand the landscape of opinions, it would be helpful to know which politician or other stakeholder takes which position-support or opposition-on these aspects of controversial topics. In this paper, we describe our system, named OpinioNetIt (pronounced similar to" opinionated"), which aims to automatically derive a map of the opinions-people network from news and other Web documents. We build this network as follows. First, we make use of a small number of generic seeds to identify controversial phrases from text …