Bridging Dictionary: AI-Generated Dictionary of Partisan Language Use

TL;DR

The Bridging Dictionary is introduced, an interactive tool designed to illuminate how words are perceived by people with different political views, and the importance of human agency and trust in further enhancing this tool is emphasized.

Abstract

Words often carry different meanings for people from diverse backgrounds. Today's era of social polarization demands that we choose words carefully to prevent miscommunication, especially in political communication and journalism. To address this issue, we introduce the Bridging Dictionary, an interactive tool designed to illuminate how words are perceived by people with different political views. The Bridging Dictionary includes a static, printable document featuring 796 terms with summaries generated by a large language model. These summaries highlight how the terms are used distinctively by Republicans and Democrats. Additionally, the Bridging Dictionary offers an interactive interface that lets users explore selected words, visualizing their frequency, sentiment, summaries, and examples across political divides. We present a use case for journalists and emphasize the importance of human agency and trust in further enhancing this tool. The deployed version of Bridging Dictionary is available at https://dictionary.ccc-mit.org/.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Selected views of the Bridging Dictionary: an interactive front page with user text input, and a static paper edition page.
• Figure 2: Six core sections in the interactive demo to help users explore how two communities use a term differently.