Abstract
AbstractIn this article, we present a machine learning-based solution for matching the performance of the gold standard of double-blind human coding when it comes to content analysis in comparative politics. We combine a quantitative text analysis approach with supervised learning and limited human resources in order to classify the front-page articles of a leading Hungarian daily newspaper based on their full text. Our goal was to assign items in our dataset to one of 21 policy topics based on the codebook of the Comparative Agendas Project. The classification of the imbalanced classes of topics was handled by a hybrid binary snowball workflow. This relies on limited human resources as well as supervised learning; it simplifies the multiclass problem to one of binary choice; and it is based on a snowball approach as we augment the training set with machine-classified observations after each successful round and also between corpora. Our results show that our approach provided better precision results (of over 80% for most topic codes) than what is customary for human coders and most computer-assisted coding projects. Nevertheless, this high precision came at the expense of a relatively low, below 60%, share of labeled articles.
Highlights
In the st century, machine learning (ML) has become one of the cutting-edge subfields of quantitative political science
We present an ML-based solution for matching the performance of the gold standard of double-blind human coding when it comes to the multiclass classification of imbalanced classes of policy topics in newspaper articles
As we described in the previous section, we tested our HBS process of ML-based classification on a use case of Hungarian media corpora
Summary
In the st century , machine learning (ML) has become one of the cutting-edge subfields of quantitative political science. Combined with other fast-developing areas of research, such as text mining, it offers new solutions to the methodological problems of the creation of Big Data datasets which serve as the basis for a swathe of contemporary quantitative political analysis. Despite these methodological advancements, some of the most important international collaborative projects in comparative politics still rely on human effort in creating Big Data databases. These efforts have mostly relied on double-blind human coding a few experimental papers supplanted human coding with a dictionary-based method
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