A relativistic opinion mining approach to detect factual or opinionated news sources

Abstract

The credibility of news cannot be isolated from that of its source. Further, it is mainly associated with a news source’s trustworthiness and expertise. In an effort to measure the trustworthiness of a news source, the factor of “is factual or opinionated” must be considered among others. In this work, we propose an unsupervised probabilistic lexicon-based opinion mining approach to describe a news source as “being factual or opinionated”. We get words’ positive, negative, and objective scores from a sentiment lexicon and normalize these scores through the use of their cumulative distribution. The idea behind the use of such a statistical approach is inspired from the relativism that each word is evaluated with its difference from the average word. In order to test the effectiveness of the approach, three different news sources are chosen. They are editorials, New York Times articles, and Reuters articles, which differ in their characteristic of being opinionated. Thus, the experimental validation is done by the analysis of variance on these different groups of news. The results prove that our technique can distinguish the news articles from these groups with respect to “being factual or opinionated” in a statistically significant way.