Sentiment Analysis of Tweets About Donald Trump

Background

The Oxford Dictionary defines Sentiment analysis as “the process of computationally identifying and categorizing opinions expressed in a piece of text, especially in order to determine whether the writer’s attitude towards a particular topic, product, etc. is positive negative, or neutral”.

In machine learning, sentiment analysis uses a combination of NLP, statistics, classification algorithm(s) to help characterize the text in terms of sentiment. In this case, sentiment analysis will be run on a set of tweets that mention the account: @realDonaldTrump.

So, what happens when you run sentiment analysis on tweets about Donald Trump?

Method

• Sentiment Analysis using MonkeyLearn and SVM as the machine learning algorithm for the classification
• Using 302 Tweets that included “@realDonaldTrump” from 11/24/17 to 11/25/17 (24hrs)
  • Manually classified as positive, negative, or neutral
  • Ran 5 trials of the SVM classifier on the same 302 tweets
• Tweets were data-mined using Tweepy Python package
• Analysis:
  • Determining if a tweet is positive, negative, or neutral
  • Determining the most used words

Results

Positive, Negative, and Neutral Tweets

Average Accuracy: 85.8%

Keywords

The keywords gathered from MonkeyLearn; words in larger font appeared more frequently.

Conclusion

The results indicated that tweets which mention @realDonaldTrump were overwhelmingly negative, which could have caused the 14.2% of misclassified tweets. If the data set were more equal, it could have given a higher accuracy for classification. However, when classifying the tweets, the multi-class SVM had an average accuracy of 85.8% in the classification of the set of 302 tweets. The consistent accuracy in classification might indicate that sentiment analysis can be used to classify tweets, assuming that the sample size contains a lot of keywords which pertain to either positive, negative, or neutral.

References

Code: http://ipullrank.com/step-step-twitter-sentiment-analysis-visualizing-united-airlines-pr-crisis/

Tweepy Documentation: https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/tweepy/latest/tweepy.pdf

Sentiment Analysis Definition: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sentiment_analysis