1 Pain Points in Supervised Learning for Political Science

As sources of text data proliferate in political science, researchers increasingly turn to advanced computational methods to test long-standing theories, develop new hypotheses, and generate novel measures of important concepts across every subfield of the discipline (Grimmer and Stewart Reference Grimmer and Stewart2013). Such tools fall into two categories: unsupervised methods like topic models, factor analysis, or clustering, and supervised methods like LASSO regression, random forests, support vector machines, and neural networks. While unsupervised methods are useful for exploratory and descriptive analysis, supervised methods offer unique promise in political science since they can encode researcher expertise in interpreting documents and extracting useful information from them (Grimmer, Roberts, and Stewart Reference Grimmer, Roberts and Stewart2021). Supervised methods have quickly gained prominence: nearly 50 such papers have appeared in political science’s top three journals since 2018 (Knox, Lucas, and Cho Reference Knox, Lucas and Cho2022), addressing such literatures as terrorism (Huff and Kertzer Reference Huff and Kertzer2018), censorship (King, Pan, and Roberts Reference King, Pan and Roberts2013), ideology (Bonica Reference Bonica2018), media bias (Mozer et al. Reference Mozer, Miratrix, Kaufman and Anastasopoulos2020), and normative theory (Blaydes, Grimmer, and McQueen Reference Blaydes, Grimmer and McQueen2018).

The standard approach in the social sciences to building a supervised text analysis model follows six key steps: (1) identify a corpus of documents, (2) train human coders to evaluate documents according to the quantity of interest, (3) present those trained coders with a subset of documents drawn at random from the corpus, (4) convert those documents into a low-dimensional representation to train a supervised learning algorithm,Footnote ¹ (5) generate predictions for the remainder of documents in the corpus, and (6) validate those predictions, typically by examining face validity, calculating accuracy metrics like calibration and area under the receiver-operator characteristic (AUC). For example, a researcher might want to study the partisan leanings of newspaper stories in the United States (Gentzkow and Shapiro Reference Gentzkow and Shapiro2010; Mozer et al. Reference Mozer, Miratrix, Kaufman and Anastasopoulos2020). She might collect a dataset of 10,000 newspaper articles, and then ask research assistants familiar with the tenor of American politics to read 1,000 articles from that corpus of 10,000 and rate each as either liberal, conservative, or nonpartisan. Then, providing a supervised learning algorithm with both the text of those articles and the ratings her research assistants produced, she would generate predictions for the remaining 9,000 articles, completing her dataset.Footnote ²

The most resource-intensive steps in this workflow are (2) and (3): training human coders to extract relevant information from documents and then paying them to do so, often over the course of weeks or months. The researcher studying news article partisan bias might need to train her students how to identify subtle cues, dog whistles, or framing effects within stories, and even once trained, she might find that her students’ ratings diverge, leading her to multiply code each of the 1,000 articles and noisily aggregate those ratings. Even so, she might find that her predictive model performs poorly if her 1,000 articles are too few, if her research assistants’ codings disagree or otherwise contain too much measurement error, or for any number of other reasons.

Recognizing this widespread problem, a growing literature aims to improve this practice, reducing labeling costs and improving accuracy. One such approach substitutes fewer expert coders for many nonexperts in a crowdsourcing context (Benoit et al. Reference Benoit, Conway, Lauderdale, Laver and Mikhaylov2016), improving step (2); a complementary approach selects training set documents algorithmically, either in an unsupervised topic modeling (Taddy Reference Taddy2013) or more-costly active-learning (Miller, Linder, and Mebane Reference Miller, Linder and Mebane2020) or semi-supervised (Gennaro and Ash Reference Gennaro and Ash2022) framework, reducing effort at step (3).

We introduce and validate a new method for improving predictive accuracy and reducing the cost of supervised text-as-data models at step (3). Rather than an active-learning or semi-supervised approach, which require researcher time and expertise, our method is fully unsupervised and accompanied by easy-to-use software. We show that selecting the training set using an algorithmic approach rather than either a simple-random sample or a topic model-based method (Taddy Reference Taddy2013) leads to substantial gains in model accuracy,Footnote ³ holding constant the number of training examples. Considering a baseline accuracy for a binary classification problem of 50%, this workflow can almost increase the gains in accuracy above baseline by as much as 50%, or produce similar accuracy statistics with as few as one-third of the number of training examples (and therefore cost). This reduction in costs and increase in accuracy can help to improve how accessible machine learning methods are to social science researchers, mitigating structural inequalities in researchers’ abilities to conduct empirical work (Sumner, Farris, and Key Reference Sumner, Farris and Key2021).

2 Selecting Training Observations Intelligently

Considering again our study of news article partisan bias, imagine that our research assistant carefully reads the first two documents, assigning the first a label of “liberal” and the second a label of “conservative.” A third document of the category “nonpartisan” adds more information to the training set than another document labeled “liberal” or “conservative”. We argue that an intelligent sampling scheme for selecting documents to label must ensure that all “types” of observations are included. For example, one such algorithm divides the covariate space into equal-sized (or equally populated) subspaces and randomly samples from each; another might find the k observations such that the sum of the distances between any two observations is maximized.

We divide this problem into two steps (Mozer et al. Reference Mozer, Miratrix, Kaufman and Anastasopoulos2020): (1) representing the text as a numeric vector in reduced dimension and (2) selecting a metric to optimize in that lower-dimensional space. As a foundational approach to this problem, Taddy (Reference Taddy2013) represents text with a topic model and selects observations satisfying a “space-filling d-optimality” criterion, finding encouraging results. But compared with newer neural network-based approaches, the topic model representation is information-poor (Grimmer et al. Reference Grimmer, Roberts and Stewart2021); likewise, simpler representations might better capture variation across documents (Mozer et al. Reference Mozer, Miratrix, Kaufman and Anastasopoulos2020). Considering eight low-dimensional representations and seven subset selection methods drawn from natural language processing (Rodriguez and Spirling Reference Rodriguez and Spirling2022) plus several baseline methods, we systematically evaluate 57 approaches to select training observations. For a complete accounting of these methods and comparisons between them, see Appendix 1 of the Supplementary Material.

3 Empirical Strategy and Results

To validate the usefulness of this approach and to identify the optimal method, we conduct a simulation analysis of two supervised learning problems, one from American politics and one from social media, and show that for any given training set size, most of our approaches produce higher predictive accuracy than either the random sampling or Taddy’s (Reference Taddy2013) approaches.

Our first application examines presidential unilateral power. Presidents issue a large number of unilateral actions, but most are either ceremonial or inconsequential (Howell Reference Howell2003). Chiou and Rothenberg (Reference Chiou and Rothenberg2014) build a measure of unilateral action significance using media mentions, assuming that more heavily reported unilateral actions are more important for policy and governance. Using those scores as training labels, Kaufman and Rogowski (Reference Kaufman and Rogowskiforthcoming) collect the text of every unilateral action issued since 1789 and build a model to estimate unilateral action significance from an action’s text. We consider a sample of 10,746 documents labeled as either significant ( $= 1.8\%$ ) or ceremonial ( $= 0.92\%$ ).

Our second example studies StockTwits, a Twitter-like social media platform focused on the stock market. Users optionally tag their tweets as “bullish” ( $= 1.11\%$ ) or “bearish” ( $= 0.89\%$ ). We explore a sample of 6,264 tweets and their binary labels. This application complements the first well: StockTwits documents are much shorter than presidential orders, contain complex tokens like emoji, and use less formal language. Together, these cover two of the most common categories of text analysis in political science.

3.2 Results

Many approaches to training set selection outperform the two baseline methods: random sampling, and that of Taddy (Reference Taddy2013). Figure 1 presents the two top-performing methods and the two baselines for each application. In both plots, the x-axis indicates the number of training observations, and the y-axis indicates model accuracy as measured by AUC. Each point is the average AUC for that method across each of the 10 random train/test splits, with vertical bars indicating two standard errors. Tables 1 and 2 in the Supplementary Material present AUC and standard errors for the complete set of methods.Footnote ⁵

Figure 1

The top two methods substantially outperform both the random sampling and the Taddy (Reference Taddy2013) approaches, achieving both accuracy gains and cost reductions. The improvement over random sampling is similarly strong for the Executive Orders than for the StockTwits application. Note: the x-axis locations of each point are jittered for readability.

In the first application, the best-performing method with 3,000 training observations achieves an AUC of 0.69, whereas the random sampling method achieves 0.66 and Taddy achieves 0.67; both are statistically distinct from 0.69. While this change in accuracy may seem small, a completely random classifier would have an AUC of 0.5, so an increase from 0.66 to 0.69 is a 16% improvement above baseline. Another interpretation of this result is that to achieve an AUC of more than 0.66, the random sampling approach requires approximately 3,000 training samples and the Taddy approach requires 2,000; the best-performing word-embedding model only requires fewer than 1,000 observations to achieve the same accuracy, a reduction of 66% and 50%, respectively. And, while trained undergraduates are sufficient for most applications in the social sciences, some applications require coders with specialized knowledge like judges (Kaufman, King, and Komisarchik Reference Kaufman, King and Komisarchik2017), legislators (Matsuo and Fukumoto Reference Matsuo and Fukumoto2021), or physicians (Gulshan et al. Reference Gulshan2016), rendering these sample size reductions hugely valuable.

In the second application, Taddy performs relatively better with larger training set sizes, but again we observe that the random sampling method’s accuracy with 3,000 observations is the same as the best-performing methods’ accuracy with 1,000 observations. And, with fewer than 1,000 observations, both Taddy and random sampling are statistically worse-performing than the best methods. However, the absolute gains from the best-performing methods are lower in this application, possibly because the documents are shorter.

Overall, we find that methods perform comparably well across applications, correlating at 0.88. Reconstruction loss is the best-performing distance metric and BERT is the best-performing representation, though in combination the bag-of-words representation yields the greatest accuracy improvements (see Table 3 in the Supplementary Material). Importantly, most of these methods are computationally quick to calculate, most often quicker than the Taddy method. We present full results for all 57 methods, including computing time comparisons, in Appendix 3 of the Supplementary Material.Footnote ⁶