Polarizing opinions about political and social controversies take place commonly in mass and more recently user-generated media. A functional democratic society builds on civic discussions among people holding different beliefs on an issue. However, so far, few computer technologies have been devoted to facilitate mutual understanding, and arguably could have worsened the situation. We envision...

Polarizing discussions on political and social issues are common in mass and user-generated media. However, computer-based understanding of ideological discourse has been considered too difficult to undertake. In this paper we propose a statistical model for ideology discourse. By ideology we mean “a set of general beliefs socially shared by a group of people.” For example, Democratic and Repub...

1. Overview China, in its 50 years of communist rule since liberation, has experienced cultural and ideological change on a massive scale. The editorials from the People’s Daily, the typical public discourse representing the Communist ideology of China, encoded these ideological changes in its formulations. This study will present the meaning changes of some political-social keywords in editori...

The paper presents two studies on vagueness in political discourse. The first is a qualitative analysis of the commonsense definition of vagueness and related notions in political discourse. Participants were submitted two fragments of real political argumentations and a questionnaire asking to rate them as to vagueness, sincerity, persuasiveness and other criteria. They showed that two aspects...

The first part of this essay considers Sri Aurobindo’s nationalism and contextualizes it within the colonial-national interchange and the modern understanding of the nation. It then problematizes Hindutva’s attempts to reductively appropriate Sri Aurobindo’s pluralistic and evolutionary nationalism. In the second part, a close reading is conducted of a well-known nationalist speech of Sri Aurob...

If an ‘ideology’, in its broadest sense, is ‘a system of ideas’, semiotics, the study of sign systems, is predestined to make essential contributions to the study of ideologies. The semiotic approach to the study of ideology begins with an investigation of the concept itself, which has changed considerably in the course of its history. Theoretical semiotics has studied signs of ideologies and i...

Media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. The analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. Adopting van Dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the Iranian movie A Separation, the winner of the 84th An...

media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. the analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. adopting van dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the iranian movie a separation, the winner of the 84th annual academy award f...