Classifying Social Identities Based on Twitter
by Anna Priante, Djoerd Hiemstra, Tijs van den Broek, Aaqib Saeed, Michel Ehrenhard, and Ariana Need
We combine social theory and NLP methods to classify English-speaking Twitter users’ online social identity in profile descriptions. We conduct two text classification experiments. In Experiment 1 we use a 5-category online social identity classification based on identity and self-categorization theories. While we are able to automatically classify two identity categories (Relational and Occupational), automatic classification of the other three identities (Political, Ethnic/religious and Stigmatized) is challenging. In Experiment 2 we test a merger of such identities based on theoretical arguments. We find that by combining these identities we can improve the predictive performance of the classifiers in the experiment. Our study shows how social theory can be used to guide NLP methods, and how such methods provide input to revisit traditional social theory that is strongly consolidated in offline setting
To be presented at the EMNLP Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS) on November 5 in Austin, Texas, USA.
Download the code book and classifier source code from github.