arXiv Computation and Language

Automated Identification of Competing Narratives in Political Discourse on Social Media

The paper introduces an unsupervised framework that identifies and characterizes competing narratives in political discourse on social media, specifically analyzing German politicians' tweets. It uses a multi‑stage pipeline incorporating topic modeling, event detection, and event linking to form coherent stories and reveal distinct user community perspectives. Two case studies on polarizing issues demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in uncovering divergent viewpoints and framing conflicts around trending political topics.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Global Crises and National Policies: A Large Scale Analysis of Political Content in German Language Online Media

The study analyzes millions of German-language online articles and tweets from 2019–2022 to uncover political biases using automated text analysis. It finds that international events such as the COVID‑19 pandemic and the Ukraine war create thematic convergence between German and Swiss media, while domestic policy differences drive divergence in locally focused topics. Newspapers maintain more stable political content, whereas Twitter shows rapid, event‑driven spikes, illustrating how media platforms differ in intensity and timing.

By Yara D\"oring, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Against Political Polarization: A Unified Framework for Tracing Evolving Political Ideologies on Social Media

The paper introduces TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It combines a PIDN module that uses large language models, style transfer, and unsupervised domain adaptation to detect ideologies and filter noise, with a PIPN module that employs temporal graph neural networks to predict future ideological shifts. The authors release two large-scale datasets and validate the approach on platforms such as X and Truth Social, offering empirical insights into political polarization and ideology evolution.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Against Political Polarization: A Unified Framework for Tracing Evolving Political Ideologies on Social Media

The paper introduces TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It combines a PIDN module that uses large language models, style transfer, and unsupervised domain adaptation to detect ideologies and filter noise, with a PIPN module that employs temporal graph neural networks to predict future ideological shifts. The authors release two large-scale datasets and validate the approach on platforms such as X and Truth Social, offering empirical insights into political polarization and online ideology evolution.

By Yijie Xu, Chao Wang, Hui Xiong
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Beyond Sentiment: Comparing Traditional NLP and LLM-Based Multi-Dimensional Analysis for Political News Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 05155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional sentiment analysis (SA) models, while effective for polarity classification, provide limited insight into the rhetorical, ideological, and framing dimensions of political discourse -- dimensions that are central to research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH).

By Maryam Fooladi, Federico Bottino
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Paid Voices vs. Public Feeds: Interpretable Cross-Platform Theme-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse

arXiv:2601. 13317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion.

By Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu, Tunazzina Islam
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Retrieving Relations, Detecting Fallacies: A RAG Approach to Political Debate Analysis

The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented framework for detecting and classifying fallacies in political debate transcripts. By dynamically retrieving documents guided by argumentative relations of support and attack, the method leverages external knowledge to improve performance. Experiments on the ElecDeb60to20 benchmark show significant gains, raising macro‑F1 to 0.864 for detection and 0.725 for classification compared to non‑retrieval baselines.

By Deborah Dore, Greta Damo, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

Posts of Peril: Detecting Information About Hazards in Text

arXiv:2405. 17838v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Socio-linguistic indicators of affectively-relevant phenomena, such as emotion or sentiment, are often extracted from text to better understand features of human-computer interactions, including on social media.

By Keith Burghardt, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Chyna Tang, Anne Pisor, Kristina Lerman