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Understanding political polarization using language models: A dataset and method
AI Magazine
  • Samiran Gode, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Supreeth Bare, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Hyungon Yoo, Carnegie Mellon University
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Our paper aims to analyze political polarization in US political system using language models, and thereby help candidates make an informed decision. The availability of this information will help voters understand their candidates' views on the economy, healthcare, education, and other social issues. Our main contributions are a dataset extracted from Wikipedia that spans the past 120 years and a language model-based method that helps analyze how polarized a candidate is. Our data are divided into two parts, background information and political information about a candidate, since our hypothesis is that the political views of a candidate should be based on reason and be independent of factors such as birthplace, alma mater, and so forth. We further split this data into four phases chronologically, to help understand if and how the polarization amongst candidates changes. This data has been cleaned to remove biases. To understand the polarization, we begin by showing results from some classical language models in Word2Vec and Doc2Vec. And then use more powerful techniques like the Longformer, a transformer-based encoder, to assimilate more information and find the nearest neighbors of each candidate based on their political view and their background. The code and data for the project will be available here: “https://github.com/samirangode/Understanding_Polarization”.

DOI
10.1002/aaai.12104
Publication Date
7-24-2023
Keywords
  • Computational linguistics,
  • Polarization
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Open Access

License: CC by 4.0

Uploaded: April 03, 2024

Citation Information
Samiran Gode, Supreeth Bare, Bhiksha Raj and Hyungon Yoo. "Understanding political polarization using language models: A dataset and method" AI Magazine Vol. 44 Iss. 3 (2023) p. 248 - 254 ISSN: 07384602
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/bhiksha-raj/2/