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Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…

Aspect-based opinion mining is the task of identifying sentiment at the aspect level in opinionated text, which consists of two subtasks: aspect category extraction and sentiment polarity classification. While aspect category extraction…

Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkably powerful capabilities. One of the crucial factors to achieve success is aligning the LLM's output with human preferences. This alignment process often requires only a small amount of data to…

Although deep learning models perform remarkably well across a range of tasks such as language translation and object recognition, it remains unclear what high-level logic, if any, they follow. Understanding this logic may lead to more…

Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails…

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a core technique for recommender systems. Traditional CF approaches exploit user-item relations (e.g., clicks, likes, and views) only and hence they suffer from the data sparsity issue. Items are usually…

We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…

Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…

Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This paper extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents a…

Human interactions in the online world comprise a combination of positive and negative exchanges. These diverse interactions can be captured using signed network representations, where edges take positive or negative weights to indicate the…

Experimental methods for estimating the impacts of text on human evaluation have been widely used in the social sciences. However, researchers in experimental settings are usually limited to testing a small number of pre-specified text…

Nowadays, social media plays an important role in many fields, such as the promotion of measures against major infectious diseases, merchandising, etc. In social media, some people are known as opinion leaders due to their strong ability to…

Polarization is a well-documented phenomenon across a wide range of social issues. However, prevailing theories often compartmentalize the examination of herding behavior and opinion convergence within different contexts. In this study, we…

Word embeddings -- distributed representations of words -- in deep learning are beneficial for many tasks in natural language processing (NLP). However, different embedding sets vary greatly in quality and characteristics of the captured…

Social scientists have recently turned to analyzing text using tools from natural language processing like word embeddings to measure concepts like ideology, bias, and affinity. However, word embeddings are difficult to use in the…

Models such as latent semantic analysis and those based on neural embeddings learn distributed representations of text, and match the query against the document in the latent semantic space. In traditional information retrieval models, on…

Most existing word embedding approaches do not distinguish the same words in different contexts, therefore ignoring their contextual meanings. As a result, the learned embeddings of these words are usually a mixture of multiple meanings. In…

Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…

Mapping political party systems to metric policy spaces is one of the major methodological problems in political science. At present, in most political science project this task is performed by domain experts relying on purely qualitative…