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PolitScope: An Unsupervised Natural Language Processing Tool for Political Bias Detection

Persistent URL
Author(s)
Smith, Titus
Date Issued
May 5, 2025
Abstract
PolitScope is a web-based browser extension designed to address the growing issue of political bias present in social media, a challenge that contributes to the increasing polarization in society today. As bias escalates on social media, it's more important than ever to have reliable methods for detecting and analyzing it. This study explores the use of natural language processing (NLP) to create an automated system for identifying political bias. The methodology involves cleaning and embedding text using the RoBERTa model, then clustering similar text to create a baseline model. This model is saved and used to compare and dynamically detect bias in newly collected web text. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate PolitScope's effectiveness, examining how various parts of speech influence bias detection. While the results show that PolitScope is not yet perfect, the tool demonstrates the potential of NLP in highlighting political bias in online social media platforms, and contributing to the broader conversation about bias in digital media.
Major
Computer Science
Honors
Computer and Information Science, 2025
First Reader(s)
Graber, Emily
Other Reader(s)
Luman, Douglas J.
Department
Computer and Information Science
Type of Publication
Senior Project Paper
File(s)
Thumbnail Image
Name

PolitScope Thesis.pdf

Size

713.57 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

ccf4008f3f992c0a1c5318ba037cd03f