Identifying Political Sentiment between Nation States with Social Media

This paper describes an approach to largescale modeling of sentiment analysis for the social sciences. The goal is to model relations between nation states through social media. Many cross-disciplinary applications of NLP involve making predictions (such as predicting political elections), but this paper instead focuses on a model that is applicable to broader analysis. Do citizens express opinions in line with their home country’s formal relations? When opinions diverge over time, what is the cause and can social media serve to detect these changes? We describe several learning algorithms to study how the populace of a country discusses foreign nations on Twitter, ranging from state-of-theart contextual sentiment analysis to some required practical learners that filter irrelevant tweets. We evaluate on standard sentiment evaluations, but we also show strong correlations with two public opinion polls and current international alliance relationships. We conclude with some political science use cases.