Sentiment diversification with different biases

  • Authors:

  • Elif Aktolga;James Allan

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Prior search result diversification work focuses on achieving topical variety in a ranked list, typically equally across all aspects. In this paper, we diversify with sentiments according to an explicit bias. We want to allow users to switch the result perspective to better grasp the polarity of opinionated content, such as during a literature review. For this, we first infer the prior sentiment bias inherent in a controversial topic -- the 'Topic Sentiment'. Then, we utilize this information in 3 different ways to diversify results according to various sentiment biases: (1) Equal diversification to achieve a balanced and unbiased representation of all sentiments on the topic; (2) Diversification towards the Topic Sentiment, in which the actual sentiment bias in the topic is mirrored to emphasize the general perception of the topic; (3) Diversification against the Topic Sentiment, in which documents about the 'minority' or outlying sentiment(s) are boosted and those with the popular sentiment are demoted. Since sentiment classification is an essential tool for this task, we experiment by gradually degrading the accuracy of a perfect classifier down to 40%, and show which diversification approaches prove most stable in this setting. The results reveal that the proportionality-based methods and our SCSF model, considering sentiment strength and frequency in the diversified list, yield the highest gains. Further, in case the Topic Sentiment cannot be reliably estimated, we show how performance is affected by equal diversification when actually an emphasis either towards or against the Topic Sentiment is desired: in the former case, an average of 6.48% is lost across all evaluation measures, whereas in the latter case this is 16.23%, confirming that bias-specific sentiment diversification is crucial.