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Twitter Sentiment Analysis in Python: Instructions

Help

Twitter represents a fundamentally new instrument to make social measurements. Millions of people
voluntarily express opinions across any topic imaginable --- this data source is incredibly valuable for
both research and business.
For example, researchers have shown that the "mood" of communication on twitter reflects
biological rhythms and can even used to predict the stock market. A student here at UW used
geocoded tweets to plot a map of locations where "thunder" was mentioned in the context of
a storm system in Summer 2012.
Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University studying the characteristics and
dynamics of Twitter have an excellent resource for learning more about how Twitter can be used to
analyze moods at national scale.
In this assignment, you will
access the twitter Application Programming Interface(API) using python
estimate the public's perception (the sentiment) of a particular term or phrase
analyze the relationship between location and mood based on a sample of twitter data
Some points to keep in mind:
This assignment is open-ended in several ways. You'll need to make some decisions about how
best to solve the problem and implement them carefully.
It is perfectly acceptable to discuss your solution on the forum, but don't share code.
Each student must submit their own solution to the problem.
You will have an unlimited number of tries for each submission.
Your code will be run in a protected environment, so you should only use the Python standard
libraries unless you are specifically instructed otherwise. Your code should also not rely on any
external libraries or web services.

The Twitter Application Programming Interface

Twitter provides a very rich REST API for querying the system, accessing data, and control your
account. You can read more about the Twitter API

Python 2.7.3 environment

If you are new to Python, you may find it valuable to work through the codeacademy Python tutorials.
Focus on tutorials 1-9, plus tutorial 12 on File IO. In addition, many students have recommended
Google's Python class.
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You will need to establish a Python programming environment to complete this assignment. You can
install Python yourself by downloading it from the Python website, or can use the class virtual machine.

Unicode strings
Strings in the twitter data prefixed with the letter "u" are unicode strings. For example:
u"This is a string"

Unicode is a standard for representing a much larger variety of characters beyond the roman alphabet
(greek, russian, mathematical symbols, logograms from non-phonetic writing systems such as kanji,
etc.)
In most circumstances, you will be able to use a unicode object just like a string.
If you encounter an error involving printing unicode, you can use the encode method to properly print
the international characters, like this:
unicode_string = u"aaa "
encoded_string = unicode_string.encode('utf-8')
print encoded_string

Getting Started
Once again: If you are new to Python, many students have recommended Google's Python class.

Problem 1: Get Twitter Data

As always, the first step is to make sure your assignment materials up to date.
To access the live stream, you will need to install the oauth2 library so you can properly authenticate.
This library is already installed on the class virtual machine, but you can install it yourself in your
Python environment. (The command $ pip install oauth2 should work for most environments.)
The steps below will help you set up your twitter account to be able to access the live 1% stream.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Create a twitter account if you do not already have one.

Go to https://dev.twitter.com/apps and log in with your twitter credentials.
Click "Create New App"
Fill out the form and agree to the terms. Put in a dummy website if you don't have one you want to
use.

5. On the next page, click the "API Keys" tab along the top, then scroll all the way down until you see
the section "Your Access Token"
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6. Click the button "Create My Access Token". You can Read more about Oauth authorization.
7. You will now copy four values into twitterstream.py. These values are your "API Key", your "API
secret", your "Access token" and your "Access token secret". All four should now be visible on the
API Keys page. (You may see "API Key" referred to as "Consumer key" in some places in the code
or on the web; they are synonyms.) Open twitterstream.py and set the variables corresponding to
the api key, api secret, access token, and access secret. You will see code like the below:
api_key = "<Enter api key>"
api_secret = "<Enter api secret>"
access_token_key = "<Enter your access token key here>"
access_token_secret = "<Enter your access token secret here>"

8. Run the following and make sure you see data flowing and that no errors occur.
$ python twitterstream.py > output.txt

This command pipes the output to a file. Stop the program with Ctrl-C, but wait at least 3 minutes
for data to accumulate. Keep the file output.txt for the duration of the assignment; we will be
reusing it in later problems. Don't use someone else's file; we will check for uniqueness in other
parts of the assignment.
9. If you wish, modify the file to use the twitter search API to search for specific terms. For example, to
search for the term "microsoft", you can pass the following url to the twitterreq function:
https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=microsoft

What to turn in: The first 20 lines of the twitter data you downloaded from the web. You
should save the first 20 lines to a file problem_1_submission.txt by using the following
command:
$ head -n 20 output.txt > problem_1_submission.txt

Problem 2: Derive the sentiment of each tweet

For this part, you will compute the sentiment of each tweet based on the sentiment scores of the terms
in the tweet. The sentiment of a tweet is equivalent to the sum of the sentiment scores for each term in
the tweet.
You are provided with a skeleton file tweet_sentiment.py which accepts two arguments on the
command line: a sentiment file and a tweet file like the one you generated in Problem 1. You can run
the skeleton program like this:
$ python tweet_sentiment.py AFINN-111.txt output.txt
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The file AFINN-111.txt contains a list of pre-computed sentiment scores. Each line in the file contains a
word or phrase followed by a sentiment score. Each word or phrase that is found in a tweet but not
found in AFINN-111.txt should be given a sentiment score of 0. See the file AFINN-README.txt for
more information.
To use the data in the AFINN-111.txt file, you may find it useful to build a dictionary. Note that the
AFINN-111.txt file format is tab-delimited, meaning that the term and the score are separated by a tab
character. A tab character can be identified a "\t".The following snippet may be useful:
afinnfile = open("AFINN-111.txt")
scores = {} # initialize an empty dictionary
for line in afinnfile:
term, score = line.split("\t") # The file is tab-delimited. "\t" means "tab character
"
scores[term] = int(score) # Convert the score to an integer.
print scores.items() # Print every (term, score) pair in the dictionary

The data in the tweet file you generated in Problem 1 is represented as JSON, which stands for
JavaScript Object Notation. It is a simple format for representing nested structures of data --- lists of
lists of dictionaries of lists of .... you get the idea.
Each line of output.txt represents a streaming message. Most, but not all, will be tweets. (The
skeleton program will tell you how many lines are in the file.)
It is straightforward to convert a JSON string into a Python data structure; there is a library to do so
called json.
To use this library, add the following to the top of tweet_sentiment.py
import json

Then, to parse the data in output.txt, you want to apply the function json.loads to every line in
the file.
This function will parse the json data and return a python data stucture; in this case, it returns a
dictionary. If needed, take a moment to read the documentation for Python dictionaries.
You can read the Twitter documentation to understand what information each tweet contains and how
to access it, but it's not too difficult to deduce the structure by direct inspection.
Your script should print to stdout the sentiment of each tweet in the file, one numeric sentiment score
per line. The first score should correspond to the first tweet, the second score should correspond to
the second tweet, and so on. If you sort the scores, they won't match up. If you sort the tweets, they
won't match up. If you put the tweets into a dictionary, the order will not be preserved. Once again:
The nth line of the file you submit should contain only a single number that represents the
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score of the nth tweet in the input file!

NOTE: You must provide a score for every tweet in the sample file, even if that score is zero. You can
assume the sample file will only include English tweets and no other types of streaming messages.
To grade your submission, we will run your program on a tweet file formatted the same way as the
output.txt file you generated in Problem 1.

Hint: This is real-world data, and it can be messy! Refer to the twitter documentation to understand
more about the data structure you are working with. Don't get discouraged, and ask for help on the
forums if you get stuck!

What to turn in: The file

answers.

tweet_sentiment.py

after you've verified that it returns the correct

Problem 3: Derive the sentiment of new terms

In this part you will be creating a script that computes the sentiment for the terms that do not appear
in the file AFINN-111.txt.
Here's how you might think about the problem: We know we can use the sentiment-carrying words in
AFINN-111.txt to deduce the overall sentiment of a tweet. Once you deduce the sentiment of a tweet,
you can work backwards to deduce the sentiment of the non-sentiment carrying words that do not
appear in AFINN-111.txt. For example, if the word soccer always appears in proximity with positive
words like great and fun, then we can deduce that the term soccer itself carries a positive
sentiment.
Don't feel obligated to use it, but the following paper may be helpful for developing a sentiment metric.
Look at the Opinion Estimation subsection of the Text Analysis section in particular.
O'Connor, B., Balasubramanyan, R., Routedge, B., & Smith, N. From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text
Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series. (ICWSM), May 2010.
You are provided with a skeleton file, term_sentiment.py, which can be executed using the following
command:
$ python term_sentiment.py <sentiment_file> <tweet_file>

Your script should print output to stdout. Each line of output should contain a term, followed by a
space, followed by the sentiment. That is, each line should be in the format <term:string>
<sentiment:float>

For example, if you have the pair ("foo", 103.256) in Python, it should appear in the output as:

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foo 103.256

The order of your output does not matter.

What to turn in: The file

term_sentiment.py

How we will grade Part 3: We will run your script on a file that contains strongly positive and strongly
negative tweets and verify that the non-sentiment-carrying terms in the strongly positive tweets are
assigned a higher score than the non-sentiment-carrying terms in negative tweets. Your scores need
not (and likely will not) exactly match any specific solution.
If the grader is returning "Formatting error: ", make note of the line of text returned in the message.
This line corresponds to a line of your output. The grader will generate this error if line.split()
does not return exactly two items. One common source of this error is to not remove the two calls to
the "lines" function in the solution template; this function prints the number of lines in each file. Make
sure to check the first two lines of your output!

Problem 4: Compute Term Frequency

Write a Python script frequency.py to compute the term frequency histogram of the livestream data
you harvested from Problem 1.
The frequency of a term can be calculated as [# of occurrences of the term in all tweets]/[# of
occurrences of all terms in all tweets]

Your script will be run from the command line like this:
$ python frequency.py <tweet_file>

You should assume the tweet file contains data formatted the same way as the livestream data.
Your script should print output to stdout. Each line of output should contain a term, followed by a
space, followed by the frequency of that term in the entire file. There should be one line per unique
term in the entire file. Even if 25 tweets contain the word lol, the term lol should only appear once
in your output (and the frequency will be at least 25!) Each line should be in the format <term:string>
<frequency:float>

For example, if you have the pair (bar, 0.1245) in Python it should appear in the output as:
bar 0.1245

If you wish, you may consider a term to be a multi-word phrase, but this is not required. You may
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compute the frequencies of individual tokens only.

Depending on your method of parsing, you may end up computing frequencies for hashtags, links,
stop words, phrases, etc. If you choose to filter out these non-words, that's ok too.

What to turn in: The file

frequency.py

Problem 5: Which State is happiest?

Write a Python script happiest_state.py that returns the name of the happiest state as a string.
Your script happiest_state.py should take a file of tweets as input. It will be called from the command
line like this:
$ python happiest_state.py <sentiment_file> <tweet_file>

The file AFINN-111.txt contains a list of pre-computed sentiment score.

Assume the tweet file contains data formatted the same way as the livestream data.
It's a good idea to make use of your solution to Problem 2.
There are different ways you might assign a location to a tweet. Here are three:
Use the coordinates field, if it exists, to geocode the tweet. This method gives the most reliable
location information, but unfortunately not very many tweets contain this field and you have to
figure out some way of translating the coordinates into a state
Use the place field. This field is hand-entered by the twitter user and may not always be present,
and will not typically contain a state. It might contain a city, though, which you could use to
determine the state.
Use the user field to determine the twitter user's home city and state. This location does not
necessarily correspond to the location where the tweet was posted, but it's reasonable to use it as
a proxy.
You are free to develop your own strategy for determining the state that each tweet originates from.
You can ignore any tweets for which you cannot assign a location in the United States.
In this file, each line is a Tweet object, asdescribed in the twitter documentation.
Note: Not every tweet will have a text field --- again, real data is dirty! Be prepared to debug, and
feel free to throw out tweets that your code can't handle to get something working. For example, you
might choose to ignore all non-English tweets.
Your script should print the two letter state abbreviation of the state with the highest average tweet
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sentiment to stdout.
Note that you may need a lot of tweets in order to get enough tweets with location data. Let the live
stream run for a while if you wish.
Your script will not have access to the Internet, so you cannot rely on third party services to
resolve geocoded locations!

What to turn in: The file

happiest_state.py

Problem 6: Top ten hash tags

Write a Python script top_ten.py that computes the ten most frequently occurring hashtags from the
data you gathered in Problem 1.
Your script will be run from the command line like this:
$ python top_ten.py <tweet_file>

You should assume the tweet file contains data formatted the same way as the livestream data.
In the tweet file, each line is a Tweet object, as described in the twitter documentation. To find the
hashtags, you should not parse the text field; the hashtags have already been extracted by twitter.
Your script should print to stdout each hashtag-count pair, one per line, in the following format:
Your script should print output to stdout. Each line of output should contain a hashtag, followed by a
space, followed by the frequency of that hashtag in the entire file. There should be one line per
unique hashtag in the entire file. Each line should be in the format <hashtag:string>
<frequency:float>

For example, if you have the pair (bar, 30) in Python it should appear in the output as:
bar 30

What to turn in: the file

top_ten.py

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