Recent events have shown that poltical outcomes such as elections can be significantly influenced by social media. Tools for collecting, monitoring and interpreting the discussions on social media, as well as better understanding of the ways in which different messages should be portrayed for maximum impact, are thus in high demand. In this talk, I will introduce the GATE social media toolkit, which provides the whole lifecycle of social media analysis, from twitter collection to analysis and finally indexing, querying and visualisation of results. I will focus particularly on a case study involving detection of hate speech against UK politicians on Twitter, demonstrating how the core sentiment analysis tools were adapted for the task, and how the toolkit was used to understand the nature of abusive comments, as well as providing insights into how the abuse has changed over the last few years.

Invitd keynote by Diana Maynard.