Developing convolutional neural networks for measuring climate change opinions from social media data

Understanding public opinions on climate change is important for policy making. Public opinion, however, is typically measured with national surveys, which are often too expensive and thus being updated at a low frequency. Twitter has become a major platform for people to express their opinions on social and political issues. Our work attempts to understand if Twitter data can provide complimentary insights about climate change perceptions. Since the nature of social media is real-time, this data source can especially help us understand how public opinion changes over time in response to climate events and hazards, which though is very difficult to be captured by manual surveys. We use the Twitter Streaming API to collect tweets that contain keywords, "climate change" or "#climatechange". Traditional machine-learning based opinion mining algorithms require a significant amount of labeled data. Data labeling is notoriously time consuming. To address this problem, we use hashtags (a significant feature used to mark topics of tweets) to annotate tweets automatically. For example, hashtags, #climatedenial and #climatescam, are negative opinion labels, while #actonclimate and #climateaction are positive. Following this method, we can obtain a large amount of training data without human labor. This labeled dataset is used to train a deep convolutional neural network that classifies tweets into positive (i.e. believe in climate change) and negative (i.e. do not believe). Based on the positive/negative tweets obtained, we will further analyze risk perceptions and opinions towards policy support. In addition, we analyze twitter user profiles to understand the demographics of proponents and opponents of climate change. Deep learning techniques, especially convolutional deep neural networks, have achieved much success in computer vision. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network architecture for understanding opinions within text. This method is compared with lexicon-based opinion analysis approaches. Results and the advantages/limitations of this method are to be discussed.