Which side are you on? identifying perspectives at the document and sentence levels

In this paper we investigate a new problem of identifying the perspective from which a document is written. By perspective we mean a point of view, for example, from the perspective of Democrats or Repub-licans. Can computers learn to identify the perspective of a document? Not every sentence is written strongly from a per-spective. Can computers learn to identify which sentences strongly convey a partic-ular perspective? We develop statistical models to capture how perspectives are expressed at the document and sentence levels, and evaluate the proposed mod-els on articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results show that the pro-posed models successfully learn how per-spectives are reflected in word usage and can identify the perspective of a document with high accuracy.