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Mining Wikileaks Data to Identify Sentiment Polarities in International Relationships

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Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9052))

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Abstract

The infamous Wikileaks cables are a large-scale resource for analyzing international relationships. We use sentiment analysis on this dataset to extract opinion polarities in the international scenario. We use an unsupervised approach based on standard sentiment lexicon with modifiers to mine opinion polarities among the cables to and from embassies/consulates of USA. Sharp changes in opinion polarities are mapped to international events happening around the time of the cable at the location of the embassy/consulate, and a positive/negative correlation is drawn. The dataset consists of 232,410 cables from 1966 up to October 2009 concerning 272 embassies and consulates across the world. The top 28 of the spikes/dips in polarity changes coming from 20 embassies/consulates are then evaluated. Our results show that there is a strong correlation (76 %) between our findings and sentiments surrounding actual events. For example, our study was able to correctly identify suicide terrorist attacks outside the American embassy in Casablanca. It could also highlight a cable that referred to a terrorist who was later arrested in New Delhi possessing secret documents related to Indian Army.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Kanpur, India

    Arpit Jain & Arnab Bhattacharya

Authors
  1. Arpit Jain
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  2. Arnab Bhattacharya
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arnab Bhattacharya .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Soochow University, Suzhou, China

    An Liu

  2. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Yoshiharu Ishikawa

  3. Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Tieyun Qian

  4. University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Sarana Nutanong

  5. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Muhammad Aamir Cheema

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Jain, A., Bhattacharya, A. (2015). Mining Wikileaks Data to Identify Sentiment Polarities in International Relationships. In: Liu, A., Ishikawa, Y., Qian, T., Nutanong, S., Cheema, M. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22324-7_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22324-7_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22323-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22324-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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