Sentiment, emotion, purpose, and style in electoral tweets

This work automatically annotates a set of 2012 US presidential election tweets for a number of attributes pertaining to sentiment, emotion, purpose, and style by crowdsourcing, and shows that the tweets convey negative emotions twice as often as positive.

Abstract

Social media is playing a growing role in elections world-wide. Thus, automatically analyzing electoral tweets has applications in understanding how public sentiment is shaped, tracking public sentiment and polarization with respect to candidates and issues, understanding the impact of tweets from various entities, etc. Here, for the first time, we automatically annotate a set of 2012 US presidential election tweets for a number of attributes pertaining to sentiment, emotion, purpose, and style by crowdsourcing. Overall, more than 100,000 crowdsourced responses were obtained for 13 questions on emotions, style, and purpose. Additionally, we show through an analysis of these annotations that purpose, even though correlated with emotions, is significantly different. Finally, we describe how we developed automatic classifiers, using features from state-of-the-art sentiment analysis systems, to predict emotion and purpose labels, respectively, in new unseen tweets. These experiments establish baseline results for automatic systems on this new data.