Leveraging Behavioral and Social Information for Weakly Supervised Collective Classification of Political Discourse on Twitter

Kristen Johnson     Di Jin     Dan Goldwasser    
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2017
[pdf]

Abstract

Framing is a political strategy in which politicians carefully word their statements in order to control public perception of issues. Previous works exploring political framing typically analyze frame usage in longer texts, such as congressional speeches. We present a collection of weakly supervised models which harness collective classification to predict the frames used in political discourse on the microblogging platform, Twitter. Our global probabilistic models show that by combining both lexical features of tweets and network-based behavioral features of Twitter, we are able to increase the average, unsupervised F1 score by 21.52 points over a lexical baseline alone.


Bib Entry

  @InProceedings{JJG_acl_2017,
    author = "Kristen Johnson and Di Jin and Dan Goldwasser",
    title = "Leveraging Behavioral and Social Information for Weakly Supervised Collective Classification of Political Discourse on Twitter",
    booktitle = "Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)",
    year = "2017"
  }