Polarization Detection on Social Networks: dual contrastive objectives for Self-supervision

Echo chambers and online discourses have become prevalent social phenomena where communities engage in dramatic intra-group confirmations and inter-group hostility. Polarization detection is a rising research topic for detecting and identifying such polarized groups. Previous works on polarization detection primarily focus on hand-crafted features derived from dataset-specific characteristics and prior knowledge, which fail to generalize to other datasets. This paper proposes a unified self-supervised polarization detection framework, which outperforms previous methods in both unsupervised and semi-supervised polarization detection tasks on various publicly available datasets. Our framework utilizes a dual contrastive objective (DocTra): (1). interaction-level: to contrast between node interactions to extract critical features on interaction patterns, and (2). feature-level: to contrast extracted polarized and invariant features to encourage feature decoupling. Our experiments extensively evaluate our methods again 7 baselines on 7 public datasets, demonstrating 5% − 10% performance improvements.