Diversité et recommandation : une investigation sur l’apport de la fouille d’opinions pour la distinction d’articles d’opinion dans une controverse médiatique

Web-based reading services such as Google News and Yahoo! News have become increasingly popular with the growth of online news consumption. To help users cope with information overload on these search engines, recommender systems and personalization techniques are utilized. These services help users find content that matches their personal interests and tastes, using their browser history and past behavior as a basis for recommendations. However, recommender systems can limit diversity of thought and the range of political perspectives that circulate within the informational environment. In consequence, relevant ideas and questions may not be seen, debatable assumptions may be taken as facts, and overspecialized recommendations may reinforce confirmation bias, special interests, tribalism, and extremist opinions. When the informational environment is insufficiently diverse, there is a loss of open inquiry, dialogue and constructive disagreement—and, as a result, an overall degradation of public discourse. Studies within the artificial intelligence field that try to solve the diversity problem for news recommender systems are confronted by many questions, including the vector model representation of digital texts and the development of a statistical measure that maximizes the difference between similar articles that are proposed to the user by the recommendation process. Studies based on opinion mining techniques propose to tackle the diversity problem in a different manner, by automatically detecting the difference of perspectives between news articles that are related by content in the recommendation process. In this latter approach, the representation of digital texts in the vector model considers a set of words that are associated with opinion expressions, such as adjectives or emotions. However, those techniques are less effective in detecting differences of opinion in a publicly argued debate, because journalistic opinions are not necessarily linked with the journalist’s subjectivity or emotions. The aims of our research are (1) to systematize and validate an opinion mining method that can classify divergent opinions within a controversial debate in the press and (2) to explore the applicability of this method in a news recommender system. We equate controversy to an opinion debate in the press where at least two camps are explicitly opposed in their understanding of a consequential question in their community. Our research raises questions about how to define opinion in this context and discusses the relevance of using discursive and enunciation theoretical approaches in opinion mining. The corpus of our experiment has 495 opinion articles about the 2012 student protest in Quebec against the raise of tuition fees announced by the Liberal Premier Minister Jean Charest. Articles were classified into two categories, ETUD and GOUV, representing the two types of opinions that dominated the debate: namely, those that favored the students and the continuation of the strike or those that favored the government and criticized the student movement.  Methodologically, our research is based on the approach of previous studies that explore techniques from the corpus linguistics field in the context of opinion mining, as well as theoretical concepts of François Rastier’s Interpretative Semantics. Our research systematizes the steps of this approach, advocating for a contrastive and interpretative description of the corpus, with the aim of discovering linguistic features that better describe the types of opinion that are to be classified. This approach allows us to select textual features that are interpretable and compatible with the enunciative phenomena in the corpus that are then used to represent the digital texts in the vector model. The approach of previous works has been validated by our analysis of the corpus. The results show that the selection of 447 textual features by an interpretative approach of the corpus performs better for the automatic classification of the opinion articles than a selection process in which the set of words are not identified by linguistic factors. Our research also evaluated the possibility of applying this approach to the development of a news recommender system, by studying the chronological evolution of the vocabulary in the corpus. We show that the selection of features at the beginning of the controversy effectively predicts the opinion of the articles that are published later, suggesting that the selection of interpretable features can benefit the development of a news recommender system in a controversial debate.

Keyphrases: opinion publique, News recommender systems, Opinion mining, Public opinion, Genre, Interpretative semantics, Corpus linguistics