Week 04

Supervised Learning I: Dictionary Methods and Off-the-Shelf Classifiers

Topics

• What are dictionaries?

• Why/when are they useful?

• What are their limitations?

• Can we use models trained by others and for other purposes in our classification tasks?

Readings

Required Readings

• [GMB] - Chapters 15-16

• Applied Papers:

  • Lori Young and Stuart Soroka 2012 “Affective News: The Automated Coding of Sentiment in Political Texts.” Political Communication, 29:2, 205-231.

  • Rathje, Steve, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander Van Der Linden. “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 26 (2021): e2024292118.

  • Ventura, Tiago, Kevin Munger, Katherine McCabe, and Keng-Chi Chang. “Connective effervescence and streaming chat during political debates.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1 (2021).

Coding Materials

• Week 4 - Dictionaries and Off-the-Shelf Classifiers

• Week 4 - Transformers Based Classifiers

Problem set 1

• Problem Set 1

Slides

• Week 4 - Dictionaries and Off-the-Shelf Classifiers