The Correlation between Language Shift and Social Conflicts in Polarized Social Media

In a polarized society, rhetorical arguments are usually expressed by strong, extreme terms which by themselves carry a positive or negative sentiment about one side of the social debate or conflict. By detecting extreme terms in a social-political text such as a blog post, we are able to automatically detect the sentiment of the text about polarizing issues in a divided society. On the other hand, during social and political conflicts in polarized societies, we observe a shift from mainstream to extreme language and rhetoric. In this research, we illustrate that there is a correlation between the language shift and social conflicts. In other words, the language shift can be used as a signal for predicting social conflicts in divided societies. The data for this research were collected from Iranian political blogs during Iran election crisis in 2009.