Content-based Classification of Political Inclinations of Twitter Users

Abstract

Social networks are huge continuous sources of information that can be used to analyze people's behavior and thoughts. Our goal is to extract such information and predict political inclinations of users. In particular, this paper investigates the importance of syntactic features of texts written by users in the process.Our hypothesis is that people belonging to the same political party write in similar ways, thus they can be classified properly on the basis of the words that they use. We analyze tweets because Twitter is commonly used in Italy for discussing about politics; moreover, it provides an official API that can be easily exploited for data extraction.Many classifiers were applied to different kinds of features and NLP vectorization methods in order to obtain the best method capable of confirming our hypothesis. To evaluate their accuracy, a set of current Italian deputies with consistent activity in Twitter has been selected as ground truth, and we have then predicted their political party. Using the results of our analysis, we also got interesting insights into current Italian politics.