Competitive Perspective Identification via Topic based Refinement for Online Documents

People write online documents from different personal perspectives. The competitive perspectives they hold reflect the conflicts in their fundamental stances and viewpoints. For many security-related applications, it is both beneficial and critical to identify the competitive perspectives implied in online documents. Previous work on competitive perspective identification is based on word features, which did not consider that the word usage for perspective expression varies with topics in documents. Thus topic information can be incorporated and contribute to a more fine-grained treatment of perspective identification. Motivated by this, this paper proposes an approach for competitive perspective identification in online documents via topic based refinement. Our approach refines the basic word feature-based perspective identification model with latent semantic information. In addition, we develop a self-adaptive process to fit the model parameters automatically. Experimental study shows the effectiveness of our approach compared to the related work and the baseline methods.