Debate on political reforms in Twitter: A hashtag-driven analysis of political polarization

Abstract

Abstract-Political debates about a reform may sparkle national controversies, by leading members of the community to polarize their opinions and sentiment about the topic addressed. With the rise of social media like Twitter users are encouraged to voice and share their strong and polarized views and in general people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before. The large amount of user-generated social data available is a great opportunity to investigate the communicative behaviors emerging in the context of such political debates and to shed some light on the way communities of users with different roles in the society and different political sentiment interact. In this paper we focussed on communications in Twitter around the reform of marriage in France in 2012 and 2013 -"Le Mariage Pour Tous" -which had been the subject of debate and controversy. We collected a corpus of tweets tagged by the hashtag #mariagepourtous, created to mark the messages about the reform. We applied different kinds of analysis on our dataset based on linguistic and non linguistic features of the observed data in order to investigate the communicative behavior in using subjective and evaluative language on a political topic. The analysis leaded also to reflect on the impact of different typologies of users involved in the virtual debate which included both political messages created by media organizations and by other individual users, from ordinary citizens to politicians or celebrities.

Building a Corpus on a Debate on Political Reform in Twitter

“…Furthermore, we could observe the "life" of the hashtag during its first propagation among Twitter users, and then diffusion within the community (see (Lai et al, 2015)). …”

“…Therefore, our annotation scheme extends the standard annotation for marking the polarity of opinions and sentiments, usually applied in corpora annotated for sentiment analysis, by including both tags for marking figurative language devices and a set of semantically oriented labels. The analyses based on linguistic and non linguistic features described in (Lai et al, 2015), which we applied for detecting the dynamics of communicative behavior of users in exploiting subjective and evaluative language, meaningfully helped us in designing this annotation scheme.…”

“…In fact, observing the corpus and the other collected data, we hypothesized that the debate developed around some particular topic, and the experiments performed validated our hypothesis. We classified the most frequently occurring words by the application of the cloud extraction techniques described in (Lai et al, 2015) to the full TW-MPT corpus tag. The result is that represented in Figure 1, showing that user tweets focused on few quite sharply distinguishable semantic areas encompassing several other relevant discussed themes: family (we labeled as FAMILLE), legal aspects (we labeled as LOI), public manifestations (we labeled as MANIF), socio-political debate (we labeled as DEBAT).…”

“…#mariagepourtous, created to mark the messages about the debate on the reform, while the selection of tags to be annotated has been based on the detection and analysis of the semantic areas involved in users posts. The detection of these areas is the result of a set of analysis we applied on the corpus described in more details in (Lai et al, 2015).…”

Proceedings of the Second Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2015

“…books, shoes, hotels and restaurants), but they quickly extended their scope to other interesting topics, like politics. Applications of sentiment analysis to politics can be mainly investigated under two perspectives: on one hand, many works focus on the possibility of predicting the election results through the analysis of the sentiment conveyed by data extracted from social media (Ceron et al, 2014;Tumasjan et al, 2011;Sang and Bos, 2012;Wang et al, 2012); on the other hand, the power of social media as "a trigger that can lead to administrative, political and societal changes" (Maynard and Funk, 2011) is also an interesting subject to investigate (Lai et al, 2015). This paper mainly focuses on the last perspective.…”