Identifying perspectives at the document and sentence levels using statistical models

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the problem of identifying the perspective from which a document was written. By perspective we mean a point of view, for example, from the perspective of Democrats or Republicans. Can computers learn to identify the perspective of a document? Furthermore, can computers identify which sentences in a document strongly convey a particular perspective? We develop statistical models to capture how perspectives are expressed at the document and sentence levels, and evaluate the proposed models on a collection of articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results show that the statistical models can successfully learn how perspectives are reflected in word usage and identify the perspective of a document with very high accuracy.