A Survey on Political Viewpoints Identification

Political viewpoints identification (PVI) is a task in Natural Language Processing that takes political texts and recognizes the writer’s opinions towards a political matter. PVI reduces the ambiguity in texts by identifying the underlying meaning and clarifying the bias margin along the political spectrum (bias leaning). Thus, even non-experts can better understand political texts. For instance, they can identify misinformation, bias, and hidden political agendas. In this paper, we formally define the concept of political viewpoints identification, explain its importance and discuss to what extent current techniques can be used for extracting political views from text. Existing techniques address the problem of PVI inadequately. We outline their deficiencies and present a research agenda to advance PVI.