Leveraging Textual Sentiment Analysis with Social Network Modelling
Wojciech Gryc, Karo Moilanen · Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture · 2014
Automatic computational analysis of political texts poses major challenges for state-of-the-art Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Processing tools. In this initial study, we investigate the feasibility of combining purely linguistic indicators of political sentiment with non-linguistic evidence gained from concomitant social network analysis. The analysis draws on a corpus of 2.8 million political blog posts by 16,741 bloggers. We focus on modeling blogosphere sentiment centered around Barack Obama during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and describe a series of initial sentiment classification experiments on a data set of 700 crowd-sourced posts labeled for attitude with respect to Obama. Our approach employs a hybrid machine-learning and logic-based framework which operates along three distinct levels of analysis encompassing standard shallow document classification, deep linguistic multi-entity sentiment analysis and scoring and social network modeling. The initial results highlight the inherent complexity of the classification task and point towards the positive effects of learning features that exploit entity-level sentiment and social-network structure.