We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization Through Machine Translation
Abstract
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a new methodology that offers a fresh perspective on interpreting polarization through the lens of machine translation. With a novel proposition that two sub-communities are speaking in two different "languages", we demonstrate that modern machine translation methods can provide a simple yet powerful and interpretable framework to understand the differences between two (or more) large-scale social media discussion data sets at the granularity of words. Via a substantial corpus of 86.6 million comments by 6.5 million users on over 200,000 news videos hosted by YouTube channels of four prominent US news networks, we demonstrate that simple word-level and phrase-level translation pairs can reveal deep insights into the current political divide -- what is "black lives matter" to one can be "all lives matter" to the other.
Cite
Text
KhudaBukhsh et al. "We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization Through Machine Translation." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V35I17.17748Markdown
[KhudaBukhsh et al. "We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization Through Machine Translation." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2021/khudabukhsh2021aaai-we/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V35I17.17748BibTeX
@inproceedings{khudabukhsh2021aaai-we,
title = {{We Don't Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization Through Machine Translation}},
author = {KhudaBukhsh, Ashiqur R. and Sarkar, Rupak and Kamlet, Mark S. and Mitchell, Tom M.},
booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
year = {2021},
pages = {14893-14901},
doi = {10.1609/AAAI.V35I17.17748},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2021/khudabukhsh2021aaai-we/}
}