Title: Is Climate Change Controversial? Modeling Controversy as Contention Within Populations,
Abstract: A growing body of research focuses on computationally detecting controversial
topics and understanding the stances people hold on them. Yet gaps remain in
our theoretical and practical understanding of how to define controversy, how
it manifests, and how to measure it. In this paper, we introduce a novel
measure we call "contention", defined with respect to a topic and a population.
We model contention from a mathematical standpoint. We validate our model by
examining a diverse set of sources: real-world polling data sets, actual voter
data, and Twitter coverage on several topics. In our publicly-released Twitter
data set of nearly 100M tweets, we examine several topics such as Brexit, the
2016 U.S. Elections, and "The Dress", and cross-reference them with other
sources. We demonstrate that the contention measure holds explanatory power for
a wide variety of observed phenomena, such as controversies over climate change
and other topics that are well within scientific consensus. Finally, we
re-examine the notion of controversy, and present a theoretical framework that
defines it in terms of population. We present preliminary evidence suggesting
that contention is one dimension of controversy, along with others, such as
"importance". Our new contention measure, along with the hypothesized model of
controversy, suggest several avenues for future work in this emerging
interdisciplinary research area.