Detecting Sociostructural Beliefs about Group Status Differences in Online Discussions
Brian Riordan, Heather Wade, Afzal Upal · 2014
Detection of fine-grained opinions and beliefs holds promise for improved so-cial media analysis for social science re-search, business intelligence, and govern-ment decision-makers. While commercial applications focus on mapping landscapes of opinions towards brands and products, our goal is to map “sociostructural ” land-scapes of perceptions of social groups. In this work, we focus on the detection of views of social group status differences. We report an analysis of methods for de-tecting views of the legitimacy of income inequality in the U.S. from online dis-cussions, and demonstrate detection rates competitive with results from similar tasks such as debate stance classification. 1