Who are the crowdworkers?
people in the US that use Amazon Mechanical Turk
We report results of a comparison of the accuracy of crowdworkers and seven NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP) toolkits in solving two important NLP tasks, named-entity recognition (NER) and entity-level sentiment(ELS) analysis. We here focus on a challenging dataset, 1,000 political tweets that were collected during the U.S. presidential primary election in February 2016. Each tweet refers to at least one of four presidential candidates,i.e., four named entities. The groundtruth, established by experts in political communication, has entity-level sentiment information for each candidate mentioned in the tweet. We tested several commercial and open-source tools. Our experiments show that, for our dataset of political tweets, the most accurate NER system, Google Cloud NL, performed almost on par with crowdworkers, but the most accurate ELS analysis system, TensiStrength, did not match the accuracy of crowdworkers by a large margin of more than 30 percent points.
As social media, specially Twitter, takes on an influential role in presidential elections in the U.S., natural language processing of political tweets BIBREF0 has the potential to help with nowcasting and forecasting of election results as well as identifying the main issues with a candidate – tasks of much interest to journalists, political scientists, and campaign organizers BIBREF1. As a methodology to obtain training data for a machine learning system that analyzes political tweets, BIBREF2 devised a crowdsourcing scheme with variable crowdworker numbers based on the difficulty of the annotation task. They provided a dataset of tweets where the sentiments towards political candidates were labeled both by experts in political communication and by crowdworkers who were likely not domain experts. BIBREF2 revealed that crowdworkers can match expert performance relatively accurately and in a budget-efficient manner. Given this result, the authors envisioned future work in which groundtruth labels would be crowdsourced for a large number of tweets and then used to design an automated NLP tool for political tweet analysis. The question we address here is: How accurate are existing NLP tools for political tweet analysis? These tools would provide a baseline performance that any new machine learning system for political tweet analysis would compete against. We here explore whether existing NLP systems can answer the questions "What sentiment?" and "Towards whom?" accurately for the dataset of political tweets provided by BIBREF2. In our analysis, we include NLP tools with publicly-available APIs, even if the tools were not specifically designed for short texts like tweets, and, in particular, political tweets. Our experiments reveal that the task of entity-level sentiment analysis is difficult for existing tools to answer accurately while the recognition of the entity, here, which politician, was easier.