Visual Analysis of Explicit Opinion and News Bias in German Soccer Articles

Abstract

Most state-of-the-art opinion and sentiment analysis techniques were developed for customer feedback data or reviews. Applying them to another domain is often not possible because the algorithms are based on the assumption that the opinions are expressed explicitly in the text. However, news articles, for instance, convey an opinion in a more subtle manner. In this work we analyze German soccer articles with respect to the sentiment that is expressed in them. Besides adapting conventional sentiment analysis algorithms to the specific domain, we also investigate what can be measured with these techniques and what should be measured on news articles according to communication scientists. We suggest to bridge the existing gap with visual analytics methods and demonstrate the usability of the techniques on a concrete application example.