English

Helping users discover perspectives: Enhancing opinion mining with joint topic models

Computation and Language 2021-04-30 v2

Abstract

Support or opposition concerning a debated claim such as abortion should be legal can have different underlying reasons, which we call perspectives. This paper explores how opinion mining can be enhanced with joint topic modeling, to identify distinct perspectives within the topic, providing an informative overview from unstructured text. We evaluate four joint topic models (TAM, JST, VODUM, and LAM) in a user study assessing human understandability of the extracted perspectives. Based on the results, we conclude that joint topic models such as TAM can discover perspectives that align with human judgments. Moreover, our results suggest that users are not influenced by their pre-existing stance on the topic of abortion when interpreting the output of topic models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.12505,
  title  = {Helping users discover perspectives: Enhancing opinion mining with joint topic models},
  author = {Tim Draws and Jody Liu and Nava Tintarev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.12505},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at the SENTIRE workshop at ICDM 2020: https://sentic.net/sentire/#2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:35:49.676Z