Opinion bias detection with social preference learning in social data

In this paper, the authors propose a novel bias detection method based on social preference learning for targets on competing topics such as "GalaxyTab vs. iPad" in Twitter. People tend to evaluate a topic by expressing their opinions towards the associated targets such as price and quality. To exploit characteristics of social data, targets are extracted by a modified HITS algorithm on a tripartite graph. The main contribution is that social preferences are learned with explicit sentiment, latent sentiment as social semantics, and lexical sentiment as contextual semantics on targets of the topic, and that the individual preference is considered together with social preferences for the bias detection of a tweet. Experimental results on Twitter collection show significant improvements over all baseline methods. The results indicate that the method deals with not only the lack of a sentiment lexicon but also social and contextual semantics on targets of social users.