Polarization Trends in Parliamentary Proceedings

Project description

Objective: Develop novel methods for operationalizing affective polarization, based on emotional language markers.  Use these methods to detect polarization in the Knesset Corpus.

Researchers: Gili Goldin, Ella Rabinovich, Shuly Wintner.

Status: Complete

Funding: Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology grant no. 3-17990.

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in polarized discourse worldwide, on various platforms. We propose a novel method for quantifying polarization, based on the emotional style of the discourse rather than on differences in ideological stands. Using measures of Valence, Arousal and Dominance, we detect signals of emotional discourse and use them to operationalize the concept of affective polarization. Applying this method to a recently released corpus of proceedings of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament (in Hebrew), we find that the emotional style of members of government differs from that of opposition members; and that the level of affective polarization, as reflected by this style, is significantly increasing with time.

Resources

The Hebrew VAD Lexicon, the Knesset Corpus Labeled for VAD,  and the models are available on HuggingFace. Other resources are available on GitHub.

Publications

• Gili Goldin, Ella Rabinovich, Shuly Wintner. Unveiling Affective Polarization Trends in Parliamentary Proceedings. Computational Linguistics, to appear. 📖