Twitter polarity classification with label propagation over lexical links and the follower graph

  • Authors:
  • Michael Speriosu;Nikita Sudan;Sid Upadhyay;Jason Baldridge

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas at Austin;University of Texas at Austin;University of Texas at Austin;University of Texas at Austin

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP '11 Proceedings of the First Workshop on Unsupervised Learning in NLP
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

There is high demand for automated tools that assign polarity to microblog content such as tweets (Twitter posts), but this is challenging due to the terseness and informality of tweets in addition to the wide variety and rapid evolution of language in Twitter. It is thus impractical to use standard supervised machine learning techniques dependent on annotated training examples. We do without such annotations by using label propagation to incorporate labels from a maximum entropy classifier trained on noisy labels and knowledge about word types encoded in a lexicon, in combination with the Twitter follower graph. Results on polarity classification for several datasets show that our label propagation approach rivals a model supervised with in-domain annotated tweets, and it outperforms the noisily supervised classifier it exploits as well as a lexicon-based polarity ratio classifier.