KnowBias: A Novel AI Method to Detect Polarity in Online Content

Abstract: We propose a novel training and inference method for detecting political bias in long text content such as newspaper opinion articles. Obtaining long text data and annotations at sufficient scale for training is difficult, but it is relatively easy to extract political polarity from tweets through their authorship; as such, we train on tweets and perform inference on articles. Universal sentence encoders and other existing methods that aim to address this domain-adaptation scenario deliver inaccurate and inconsistent predictions on articles, which we show is due to a difference in opinion concentration between tweets and articles. We propose a two-step classification scheme that utilizes a neutral detector trained on tweets to remove neutral sentences from articles in order to align opinion concentration and therefore improve accuracy on that domain. We evaluate our two-step approach using a variety of test suites, including a set of tweets and long-form articles where annotations were crowd-sourced to decrease label noise, measuring accuracy and Spearman-rho rank correlation. In practice, KnowBias achieves a high accuracy of 86 (rho = 0.65) on these tweets and 75 (rho = 0.69) on long-form articles. While we validate our method on political bias, our scheme is general and can be readily applied to other settings, where there exist such domain mismatches between source and target domains. Our implementation is available for public use at https://knowbias.ml.