Controversy Detection Using Reactions on Social Media

Abstract

In this work we demonstrate a method to detect controversy on news issues. This is done by performing an analysis of people's reaction on social media to news articles reporting these issues. Detecting controversial news topics on web is a relevant problem today. It helps to identify the issues upon which people have divided opinion and is specially useful on topics such as a presidential election, government reforms, climate change etc. We use sentiment analysis and word matching to accomplish this task. We show the application of our method for detecting controversial topics during the US Presidential elections 2016.