The CrowdFlower Blog

Image by Sarah Butrymowicz

Being tapped to write a blog post here at CrowdFlower is usually left to the experts. So with that, let me begin by making the disclaimer that I am neither a political analyst nor a data scientist. But I do have a personal fervor for politics and access to some impressive tools, thanks to my job here at CrowdFlower.

For those who aren’t familiar with CrowdFlower, we specialize in tapping human contributors worldwide to do massive amounts of simple, repetitive tasks (especially tasks that are hard for computers to do by themselves). Here’s a quick how-it-works animation.

I had been reading some old blog posts on the CrowdFlower blog when I came across an interesting 2008 post on election media bias.

I determined that this could be a great opportunity to revisit sentiment analysis, and specifically set out to see if automated sentiment detection tools vs. human assessments could yield any blog-worthy findings.

To see how far the automated sentiment tools have come, I began by using an enterprise-grade social media monitoring tool that provides sentiment analysis.

I ran a few quick monitoring searches of my own to see how the current Republican Primary election was tracking — it seemed a topical place that would be chock full of good commentary.

The instant access to well-organized data from blogs, news sources, and a variety of social media sources was outstanding.

However, I was surprised to find that for each search I conducted, the automated sentiment detection tool consistently returned an overwhelming proportion of “Neutral” ratings (frequently exceeding 90%). This seemed funny to me, given the typically emotive nature of politics. Continue reading »