Our ControCurator paper abstract titled “ControCurator: Understanding Controversy Using Collective Intelligence” has been accepted at Collective Intelligence 2017. In this paper we describe the aspects of controversy: the time-persistence, emotion, multiple actors, polarity and openness. Using crowdsourcing, the ControCurator dataset of 31888 controversy annotations was obtained for the relevance of these aspects to 5048 Guardian articles. The results indicate that each of these aspects is a positive indicator of controversy, but also that there is a clear difference in their signal strength. Most notably, the emotion was found to be the highest indicator. Though, all the measured controversy aspects were found to positively correlate with controversy. These results suggest that the controversy model is accurate and useful for modeling controversy in news articles.
The full dataset with controversy annotations is available for download at https://github.com/ControCurator/controcurator-corpus/releases/tag/1.0