Social Media Commons^™

Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang

Doctoral Dissertations

Navigating controversial topics on the Web encourages social awareness, supports civil discourse, and promotes critical literacy. While search of controversial topics particularly requires users to use their critical literacy skills on the content, educating people to be more critical readers is known to be a complex and long-term process. Therefore, we are in need of search engines that are equipped with techniques to help users to understand controversial topics by identifying them and explaining why they are controversial. A few approaches for identifying controversy have worked reasonably well in practice, but they are narrow in scope and exhibit limited performance. …