English

Computational Controversy

Computers and Society 2017-08-31 v2

Abstract

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.07643,
  title  = {Computational Controversy},
  author = {Benjamin Timmermans and Tobias Kuhn and Kaspar Beelen and Lora Aroyo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07643},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 2017