‘Super-Unsupervised’ Classification for Labelling Text: Online Political Hostility as an Illustration

We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’ learning and demonstrate its usefulness by measuring the psychologically complex construct of online political hostility based on a large corpus of tweets. This approach accomplishes the feat by combining the best features of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques: measurements of complex psychological constructs without a single labelled data source. We first outline the approach before conducting a diverse series of tests that include: (i) face validity, (ii) convergent and discriminant validity, (iii) criterion validity, (iv) external validity, and (v) ecological validity.