PerspectiveSpace: Opinion Modeling with Dimensionality Reduction

Abstract. Words mean different things to different people, and capturing these differences is often a subtle art. These differences are often “a matter of perspective,” and perspective can be taken to be the set of beliefs held by a person as a result of their background, culture, tastes, and experience. In this paper, we present a system for discovering distinct communities of people with coherent belief patterns, while providing a means to characterize those patterns. This system utilizes data on how people agree or disagree on assertions that they themselves have expressed. This system, called PerspectiveSpace, is an approach whereby elementary linear operations are used to perform calculations on user models and microtheories. PerspectiveSpace has applications ranging from discovering subcultures in a larger society to building community-driven web sites that adapt to individual perspectives, and a few such applications are illustrated in this paper. An application of Persp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: UM
• Authors: Jason B. Alonso, Catherine Havasi, Henry Lieberman
• Keywords: Coherent Belief Patterns, Different People, Elementary Linear Operations, Programming Languages, UM 2009