Developing A Multilabel Corpus for the Quality Assessment of Online Political Talk

This paper motivates and presents the Twitter Deliberative Politics dataset, a corpus of political tweets labeled for its deliberative characteristics. The corpus was randomly sampled from replies to US congressmen and women. It is expected to be useful to a general community of computational linguists, political scientists, and social scientists interested in the study of online political expression, computer-mediated communication, and political deliberation. The data sampling and annotation methods are discussed and classical machine learning approaches are evaluated for their predictive performance on the different deliberative facets. The paper concludes with a discussion of future work aimed at developing dictionaries for the quality assessment of online political talk in English. The dataset and a demo dashboard are available at https://github.com/kj2013/twitter-deliberative-politics.