Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the understanding and use of phrases, the stances are cohesive within the particular groups. However, such cohesiveness does not hold across groups. In collaborative environments or environments where impartial language is desired (e.g. Wikipedia, news media), statements and the language therein should represent equally the involved parties and be neutrally phrased. Biased language is introduced through the presence of inflammatory words or phrases, or statements that may be incorrect or one-sided, thus violating such consensus. In this work, we focus on the specific case of phrasing bias, which may be introduced through specific inflammatory words or phrases in a statement. For this purpose, we propose an approach that relies on a recurrent neural networks in order to capture the inter-dependencies between words in a phrase that introduced bias. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation, where we show the advantages of a neural based approach over competitors that rely on word lexicons and other hand-crafted features in detecting biased language. We are able to distinguish biased statements with a precision of P=0.917, thus significantly outperforming baseline models with an improvement of over 30 . Finally, we release the largest corpus of statements annotated for biased language.
@cite_15: An individual’s words often reveal their political ideology. Existing automated techniques to identify ideology from text focus on bags of words or wordlists, ignoring syntax. Taking inspiration from recent work in sentiment analysis that successfully models the compositional aspect of language, we apply a recursive neural network (RNN) framework to the task of identifying the political position evinced by a sentence. To show the importance of modeling subsentential elements, we crowdsource political annotations at a phrase and sentence level. Our model outperforms existing models on our newly annotated dataset and an existing dataset.
@cite_13: This paper considers the linguistic indicators of bias in political text. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk judgments about sentences from American political blogs, asking annotators to indicate whether a sentence showed bias, and if so, in which political direction and through which word tokens. We also asked annotators questions about their own political views. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the data, exploring how different groups perceive bias in different blogs, and showing some lexical indicators strongly associated with perceived bias.
@cite_15 introduce a RNN model for classifying statements as either liberal or conservative. Their datasets contain statements from politicians in US Congressional floor debates and statements from ideological books about US politics. For pre-selecting biased statements from the data they make use of the features used by @cite_13 and a simple classifier with manually selected partisan unigrams as features. For labeling the pre-selected statements they use crowdsourcing, where crowdworkers label not only the full statement but also each phrase part of the sentence separately in a hiearchical manner. These additional labels allow for a handling of semantic compositions and the correct classification of more complex sentence structures, when the sentence parts are incrementally combined. For example, the statement is classified as liberal bias, even though the term death tax'' suggests pro-conservative bias.