Using cocitation information to estimate political orientation in web documents

This paper introduces a simple method for estimating cultural orientation, the affiliation of online entities in a polarized field of discourse. In particular, cocitation information is used to estimate the political orientation of hypertext documents. A type of cultural orientation, the political orientation of a document is the degree to which it participates in traditionally left- or right-wing beliefs. Estimating documents' political orientation is of interest for personalized information retrieval and recommender systems. In its application to politics, the method uses a simple probabilistic model to estimate the strength of association between a document and left- and right-wing communities. The model estimates the likelihood of cocitation between a document of interest and a small number of documents of known orientation. The model is tested on three sets of data, 695 partisan web documents, 162 political weblogs, and 198 nonpartisan documents. Accuracy above 90% is obtained from the cocitation model, outperforming lexically based classifiers at statistically significant levels.