One of the most common applications of dictionary methods is sentiment analysis: using a dictionary of positive and negative words, we compute a sentiment score for each individual document.

Let’s apply this technique to tweets by the four leading candidates in the 2016 Presidential primaries.

library(quanteda)
## Warning: package 'quanteda' was built under R version 3.4.4
## Package version: 1.3.0
## Parallel computing: 2 of 4 threads used.
## See https://quanteda.io for tutorials and examples.
## 
## Attaching package: 'quanteda'
## The following object is masked from 'package:utils':
## 
##     View
tweets <- read.csv('../data/candidate-tweets.csv', stringsAsFactors=F)

We will use the LIWC dictionary to measure the extent to which these candidates adopted a positive or negative tone during the election campaign. (Note: LIWC is provided here for teaching purposes only and will not be distributed publicly.) LIWC has many other categories, but for now let’s just use positive and negative

liwc <- read.csv("../data/liwc-dictionary.csv",
                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
table(liwc$class)
## 
##     adjective        affect         anger       anxiety         cause 
##           235           445            46            92            46 
##     cognition       compare        differ   discrepancy        female 
##           252           101            46            92            46 
##        future       insight interrogation          male        negate 
##            46            92            47            46            47 
##      negative        number          past      positive         power 
##           230            36           123           211           184 
##       present         quant        reward          risk        social 
##           138            47            46            46           230 
##     tentative          verb 
##            23           329
pos.words <- liwc$word[liwc$class=="positive"]
neg.words <- liwc$word[liwc$class=="negative"]
# a look at a random sample of positive and negative words
sample(pos.words, 10)
##  [1] "kind*"       "finest"      "keen*"       "(will) like" "rich"       
##  [6] "fairer"      "intelligent" "benefits"    "secur*"      "proudest"
sample(neg.words, 10)
##  [1] "anger*"      "emptiest"    "inferiority" "anxiously"   "trickier"   
##  [6] "diss"        "aggress"     "rigidly"     "angry"       "inferior"

As earlier today, we will convert our text to a corpus object.

twcorpus <- corpus(tweets)

Now we’re ready to run the sentiment analysis! First we will construct a dictionary object.

mydict <- dictionary(list(positive = pos.words,
                          negative = neg.words))

And now we apply it to the corpus in order to count the number of words that appear in each category

sent <- dfm(twcorpus, dictionary = mydict)

We can then extract the score and add it to the data frame as a new variable

tweets$score <- as.numeric(sent[,1]) - as.numeric(sent[,2])

And now start answering some descriptive questions…

# what is the average sentiment score?
mean(tweets$score)
## [1] 0.2056106
# what is the most positive and most negative tweet?
tweets[which.max(tweets$score),]
##          screen_name
## 3125 realDonaldTrump
##                                                                                                                                              text
## 3125 .@robertjeffress I greatly appreciate your kind words last night on @FoxNews. Have great love for the evangelicals -- great respect for you.
##                 datetime
## 3125 2015-09-11 19:24:44
##                                                                  source
## 3125 <a href="http://twitter.com" rel="nofollow">Twitter Web Client</a>
##      lang score
## 3125   en     5
tweets[which.min(tweets$score),]
##          screen_name
## 6642 realDonaldTrump
##                                                                                                                                           text
## 6642 Lindsey Graham is all over T.V., much like failed 47% candidate Mitt Romney. These nasty, angry, jealous  failures have ZERO credibility!
##                 datetime
## 6642 2016-03-07 13:03:59
##                                                                                    source
## 6642 <a href="http://twitter.com/download/android" rel="nofollow">Twitter for Android</a>
##      lang score
## 6642   en    -4
# what is the proportion of positive, neutral, and negative tweets?
tweets$sentiment <- "neutral"
tweets$sentiment[tweets$score<0] <- "negative"
tweets$sentiment[tweets$score>0] <- "positive"
table(tweets$sentiment)
## 
## negative  neutral positive 
##     1265    19602     5868

We can also disaggregate by groups of tweets, for example according to the party they mention.

# loop over candidates
candidates <- c("realDonaldTrump", "HillaryClinton", "tedcruz", "BernieSanders")

for (cand in candidates){
  message(cand, " -- average sentiment: ",
      round(mean(tweets$score[tweets$screen_name==cand]), 4)
    )
}
## realDonaldTrump -- average sentiment: 0.2911
## HillaryClinton -- average sentiment: 0.1736
## tedcruz -- average sentiment: 0.1853
## BernieSanders -- average sentiment: 0.1384

But what happens if we now run the analysis excluding a single word?

pos.words <- pos.words[-which(pos.words=="great")]

mydict <- dictionary(list(positive = pos.words,
                          negative = neg.words))
sent <- dfm(twcorpus, dictionary = mydict)
tweets$score <- as.numeric(sent[,1]) - as.numeric(sent[,2])

for (cand in candidates){
  message(cand, " -- average sentiment: ",
      round(mean(tweets$score[tweets$screen_name==cand]), 4)
    )
}
## realDonaldTrump -- average sentiment: 0.1431
## HillaryClinton -- average sentiment: 0.1547
## tedcruz -- average sentiment: 0.1573
## BernieSanders -- average sentiment: 0.1265

How would we normalize by text length? (Maybe not necessary here given that tweets have roughly the same length.)

# collapse by account into 4 documents
twdfm <- dfm(twcorpus, groups = "screen_name")
twdfm
## Document-feature matrix of: 4 documents, 43,426 features (66.9% sparse).
# turn word counts into proportions
twdfm[1:4, 1:10]
## Document-feature matrix of: 4 documents, 10 features (30% sparse).
## 4 x 10 sparse Matrix of class "dfm"
##                  features
## docs                rt @geraldorivera     : recruit @realdonaldtrump   to
##   BernieSanders   1018              0  4186       0               11 2407
##   HillaryClinton  1449              0  7800       0               33 3389
##   realDonaldTrump  607              8  7138       2             2278 2537
##   tedcruz         4464              0 18871       3              203 4045
##                  features
## docs              finish that horrid eyesore
##   BernieSanders        0  747      0       0
##   HillaryClinton       5  561      0       0
##   realDonaldTrump      7  714      2       1
##   tedcruz              6  429      0       0
twdfm <- dfm_weight(twdfm, scheme="prop")
twdfm[1:4, 1:10]
## Document-feature matrix of: 4 documents, 10 features (30% sparse).
## 4 x 10 sparse Matrix of class "dfm"
##                  features
## docs                       rt @geraldorivera          :      recruit
##   BernieSanders   0.010252175   0            0.04215678 0           
##   HillaryClinton  0.009177857   0            0.04940461 0           
##   realDonaldTrump 0.003413027   4.498223e-05 0.04013540 1.124556e-05
##   tedcruz         0.018250652   0            0.07715234 1.226522e-05
##                  features
## docs              @realdonaldtrump         to       finish        that
##   BernieSanders       0.0001107799 0.02424065 0            0.007522962
##   HillaryClinton      0.0002090195 0.02146567 3.166962e-05 0.003553332
##   realDonaldTrump     0.0128086906 0.01426499 3.935945e-05 0.004014664
##   tedcruz             0.0008299468 0.01653761 2.453045e-05 0.001753927
##                  features
## docs                    horrid      eyesore
##   BernieSanders   0            0           
##   HillaryClinton  0            0           
##   realDonaldTrump 1.124556e-05 5.622779e-06
##   tedcruz         0            0
# Apply dictionary using `dfm_lookup()` function:
sent <- dfm_lookup(twdfm, dictionary = mydict)
sent
## Document-feature matrix of: 4 documents, 2 features (0% sparse).
## 4 x 2 sparse Matrix of class "dfm"
##                  features
## docs                 positive    negative
##   BernieSanders   0.008237995 0.003111908
##   HillaryClinton  0.007467697 0.001868508
##   realDonaldTrump 0.010553956 0.004486978
##   tedcruz         0.007494051 0.001418677
(sent[,1]-sent[,2])*100
## 4 x 1 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"
##                  features
## docs               positive
##   BernieSanders   0.5126088
##   HillaryClinton  0.5599189
##   realDonaldTrump 0.6066979
##   tedcruz         0.6075374