Graph-based user classification for informal online political discourse

With the rise of the interactive “Web 2.0” and the increasing tendency of online publications to turn to message-board style reader feedback venues, informal political discourse has become an important feature of the intellectual landscape of the Internet. We consider innate political bias or “sentiment” to be of interest for a variety of reasons, including as a factor in determining the reliability of posters in terms of authority and truthfulness. We describe several experiments in identifying the political orientation of posters in an informal environment. Our results indicate that the most promising approach is to augment text classification methods by exploiting information about how posters interact with each other.