Topic and user based refinement for competitive perspective identification

The competitive perspective implied in online texts reflect people's conflicts in their stances and viewpoints. Competitive perspective identification aims to determine people's inclinations to one of multiple competitive perspectives, which is an important research issue and can facilitate many security-related applications. As the word usage of different perspectives is distinct in various topics, in this paper, we first proposes a supervised topic-refined method for competitive perspective identification. Our method refines perspective classifiers with the document-topic distributions mined from texts. To reduce human labor in data annotation, we further extend our work in a semi-supervised manner and propose a user-based bootstrapping framework. As the perspectives people hold are relatively stable, our bootstrapping process leverages the user-level perspective consistency to select high-quality classified texts from unlabeled corpus and boost the perspective classifier iteratively. Experimental studies show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in identifying the competitive perspectives of online texts.