Topic-Specific Sentiment Analysis Can Help Identify Political Ideology

Abstract: Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of topics. This representation can then be used to detect ideological leanings of documents (speeches, news articles, etc.) based on the sentiments expressed towards different topics. Experiments performed using a widely used dataset show the promise of our proposed approach that achieves comparable performance to other methods despite being much simpler and more interpretable.