TextWiller @ SardiStance, HaSpeede2: Text or Con-text? A Smart Use of Social Network Data in Predicting Polarization (short paper)

In this contribution we describe the system (i.e. a statistical model) used to participate in Evalita conference 2020, SardiStance (Tasks A and B) and Haspeede2 (Tasks A and B). We first developed a classifier by extracting features from the texts and the social network of users. Then, we fit the data through an extreme gradient boosting, with cross-validation tuning of the hyper-parameters. A key factor for a good performance in SardiStance Task B was the features extraction by using Multidimensional Scaling of the distance matrix (minimum path, undirected graph) applied on each network. The second system exploits the same features above, but it trains and performs predictions in twosteps. The performances proved to be lower than those of the single-step model.