#WhoAmI in 160 characters?: Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions

Anna Priante; Djoerd Hiemstra; Tijs Adriaan van den Broek; Aaqib Saeed; Michel Léon Ehrenhard; Ariana Need

doi:10.18653/v1/W16-5608

#WhoAmI in 160 characters? Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions

Anna Priante, Djoerd Hiemstra, Tijs Adriaan van den Broek, Aaqib Saeed, Michel Léon Ehrenhard, Ariana Need

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

211 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
Subtitle of host publication	NLP+CSS, EMNLP
Place of Publication	Austin, Texas
Publisher	Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages	55-65
Number of pages	11
ISBN (Print)	978-1-945626-26-5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-5608
Publication status	Published - Nov 2016
Event	EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: proceedings of the workshop - Austin, Texas Duration: 5 Nov 2016 → …

Conference

Conference	EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
City	Austin, Texas
Period	5/11/16 → …

Keywords

EWI-27810
IR-102356
METIS-319140

Access to Document

10.18653/v1/W16-5608

W16-560

Cite this

Priante, A., Hiemstra, D., van den Broek, T. A., Saeed, A., Ehrenhard, M. L., & Need, A. (2016). #WhoAmI in 160 characters? Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions. In Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: NLP+CSS, EMNLP (pp. 55-65). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-5608

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title = "#WhoAmI in 160 characters?: Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions",

abstract = "We combine social theory and NLP methods to classify English-speaking Twitter users{\textquoteright} 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",

keywords = "EWI-27810, IR-102356, METIS-319140",

author = "Anna Priante and Djoerd Hiemstra and {van den Broek}, {Tijs Adriaan} and Aaqib Saeed and Ehrenhard, {Michel L{\'e}on} and Ariana Need",

year = "2016",

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booktitle = "Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science",

publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)",

address = "United States",

note = "EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science : EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: proceedings of the workshop ; Conference date: 05-11-2016",

}

Priante, A, Hiemstra, D, van den Broek, TA, Saeed, A, Ehrenhard, ML & Need, A 2016, #WhoAmI in 160 characters? Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions. in Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: NLP+CSS, EMNLP. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Austin, Texas, pp. 55-65, EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, Austin, Texas, 5/11/16. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-5608

#WhoAmI in 160 characters? Classifying social identities based on Twitter profile descriptions. / Priante, Anna; Hiemstra, Djoerd; van den Broek, Tijs Adriaan et al.
Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science: NLP+CSS, EMNLP. Austin, Texas: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2016. p. 55-65.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

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