Application of Interactive Computer-Assisted Argument Extraction to Opinionated Social Media Texts

Abstract

The analysis of various opinions and arguments in textual data can be facilitated by automatic topic modeling methods; however, the exploration and interpretation of the resulting topics and terms may prove to be difficult to the analysts. Opinions, stances, arguments, topics, terms, and text documents are usually connected with many-to-many relationships for such tasks. Exploratory visual analysis with interactive tools can help the analysts to get an overview of the topics and opinions, identify particularly interesting documents, and describe main themes of various arguments. In our previous work, we introduced an interactive tool called Topics2Themes that was used for topic and theme analysis of vaccination-related discussion texts with a limited set of stance categories. In this poster paper, we describe an application of Topics2Themes to a different genre of data, namely, political comments from Reddit, and multiple sentiment and stance categories detected with automatic classifiers.