an analysis of political views on blogs todd sullivan
TRANSCRIPT
An Analysis of Political Viewson Blogs
Todd Sullivan
General Layout of Project
• 8 Classes– Candidates: Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin– Parties: Republicans, Democrats, Liberals,
Conservatives
• Extract opinions about each class– Compute a FeelScore metric for each
author/class pair (provided the author mentioned the class)
• Do stuff with the FeelScores
Extracting Opinions
• Define three lists– Class Names– Word Synonyms– Feeling Indicators
• Tokenize blog posts into sentences• Find sentence that contain a class name
– Count number of positive/negative Feeling Indicators
– Apply counts to classes in sentence
Class Names
• Obama:– obama, senator of illinois, senator from
illinois, illinois senator, democrat president, democratic president, …
• Palin– palin, alaskan governor, governor of alaska,
alaska governor, republican vp, …
• Liberals– liberals, liberal, libs
Word Synonyms
• Bad– worst, unpleasant, disastrous, dirty, failure,
sucks, sux, traitor, idiot, loser, noob, dumb, …
• Good– awesome, sweet, cool, groovy, comforting,
glorious, dandy, brilliant, best, wonderful, …
• Skip Words– Very, usually, still, much, nearly, most, more,
frankly, a, an, any kind of punctuation, …
Feeling Indicators
• Negative Indicators– :is: :bad:, :bad: :plans:, :plans: :is: :bad:,
:i: do :not: want, :i: cannot stand, how :bad:, :is: :not: :good:, :i: disagree:, :i: do :not:, …
• Positive Indicators– :is: experienced, :i: agree, :i: will vote,
for president, :i: support, :i: donated,:good: speaker, …
FeelScore
• For each author a and class c
,,,,
,,,,,
),()},({1,,
),()},({1,,
log
log
caCountcaCount
caCountcaCountcaFeelScore
sorsNumIndicatcsHasClasscaCount
sorsNumIndicatcsHasClasscaCount
asBb bSentencess
asBb bSentencess
1,1, caFeelScore
Incorporating Interests and Communities
• Pull all unique interests containing one of the class’ names (obama, mccain, …)– Returns around 350 interests– Small enough to label as positive, negative, or
remove.
• Same process for communities
Positive InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count
Obama 33 201McCain 5 14Biden 4 6Palin 7 48
Negative InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count
Obama 2 3McCain 3 5Biden 0 0Palin 5 6
Positive InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count
Republicans 25 118Democrats 41 373Liberals 100 605Conservatives 38 112
Negative InterestsClass Interest Count Author Count
Republican 15 28Democrat 2 3Liberal 12 13Conservative 10 17
Interesting Interests
• Positive Interests– Not interesting: obama, mccain 08, republican
• Negative Interests– _doing_something_ to _class_
where _doing_something_ is:
anti, testing, baiting, bashing, hating,pissing off, cockpunching,forced lobotomization of, death to
Positive CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count
Obama 26 206McCain 6 15Biden 1 3Palin 5 17
Negative CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count
Obama 1 9McCain 2 13Biden 0 0Palin 3 11
Positive CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count
Republicans 8 26Democrats 19 111Liberals 45 281Conservatives 9 17
Negative CommunitiesClass Community Count Author Count
Republicans 0 0Democrats 0 0Liberals 3 10Conservatives 0 0
Example Communities
• Positive– Obama PA, GothsForObama,
TeenRepublicans
• Negative– Anti-Obama, nobama, WTF-Palin
Authors Listing Multiple Interests for the Same Class
Authors Joining Multiple Communities for the Same Class
FeelScores Across Time
• For an author a, class c, and day Day
,,,,,,
,,,,,,,,
2
,,,,,,
2
,,,,,,
),()},({1,,,
),()},({1,,,
2008,1,
2008,1,
,log
,log
DaycaAdjCountDaycaAdjCount
DaycaAdjCountDaycaAdjCountDaycaFeelScore
dcaCountDaycaAdjCount
dcaCountDaycaAdjCount
sorsNumIndicatcsHasClassdcaCount
sorsNumIndicatcsHasClassdcaCount
Day
JanddDaydayDiff
Day
JanddDaydayDiff
dasBb bSentencess
dasBb bSentencess
Including Interests and Communities
• Count an interest or community as 5 positive or negative counts added to AdjCount(a,c,Day,...) for all days on and after the interest or community was added to the database.
FeelScores Across Time Continued…
• For a class c, and day Day
DaycAuthors
DaycaFeelScore
DaycFeelScore
DaydsomeforAuthorsaa
DaycAuthors
DaycAuthorsa
,
,,
,
dc,a,FeelScore&|
,
,
Overall Blog-basedCandidate FeelScores
Overall Blog-basedParty FeelScores
Positive/Negative Candidate Chatter by Blog Network
Blog-based Candidate FeelScores Across Networks
Blog-based Party FeelScores Across Networks
Positive/Negative ChatterCandidate by Gender
Blog-based Candidate FeelScores Across Gender
Blog-based PartyFeelScores Across Gender
National Conventions
National ConventionsNew Authors
National ConventionsChanging Opinions
Presidential Debates
Presidential Debates Cont…
Vice Presidential Debate
VP Debate Cont…
Obama & McCainFeelScores by Network
National Conventionsby Network
McCain & PalinFeelScores by Network
Party FeelScores by Network
Aggregate FeelScoresby Gender
Age Ranges
Aggregate FeelScores by Age
Older People Don’t Like Liberals
Friend Networks
• 523 Democrats and 620 Republicans• 1,575 mutual links
– 64% Democrat-Republican links (Green)– 23.6% Democrat-Democrat links (Blue)– 12.4% Republican-Republican links (Red)
• The 64% number is largely influenced by a few authors. In a macro-average across authors, 50.9% of a blogger’s friends are from the blogger’s party.
Percent of Bloggersvs. Number of Friends
Political BloggingFriend Network
National Convention Poll Data
Predicting the Popular Vote
• No data after October 28, 2008, so we use Oct. 28 data for calculations.
• For each author a
Classesc
Classesc
nullOctcaFeelScore
OctcaFeelScorecPartyaLeaning
DemocratpublicanPalinMcCaincif
LiberalDemocratBidenObamacifcParty
28,,1
28,,
,Re,,1
,,,1
Assigning Votes Continued
a
a
a
aLeaningotersUndecidedV
sMcCainVote
aLeaningotersUndecidedV
ObamaVotes
aLeaningotersUndecidedV
aLeaning
1.012
1.012
1.0,1.01
1,1
Popular Vote
Classes Used Obama McCain# of
AuthorsObamaMcCain 56.5% 43.4% 3,790
Obama-Bidenvs.
McCain-Palin53.6% 46.4% 4,470
Obama-Biden-Democratvs.
McCain-Palin-Republican51.8% 48.2% 5,217
Obama-Biden-Democrat-Liberal
vs.McCain-Palin-
Republican-Conservative
51.2% 48.8% 5,832
• Actual Result: Obama 53%, McCain 46%
Exit Polls by GenderCNN Exit Poll Results
Gender Obama McCain # Polled
Female 56% 44% 9,453Male 51% 49% 8,740
Predicted Results
Gender Obama McCain# of
AuthorsFemale 55.4% 44.6% 261Male 54.1% 45.9% 636
Exit Polls by AgeCNN Exit Poll Results
Age Obama McCain # Polled
18 to 29 67% 33% 3,21030 to 44 53% 47% 5,08345 to 64 50% 50% 6,689
65+ 46% 54% 2,854
Predicted Poll Results
Age Obama McCain# of
Authors18 to 29 60.4% 39.6% 47630 to 44 56.8% 43.2% 29445 to 64 57.0% 43.0% 135
65+ 33.3% 67.7% 36
Questions?