Using Machine Learning for Analyzing Sentiment Orientations Toward Eight Countries

By using machine learning technique, this article presents sentiment and concept analyses on 48,043 articles published in The Economist from 1991 through 2016. The Economist is one of the world’s most influential political and economic magazines. The article analyzes and compares the magazine’s sentiment orientations toward the Group of Seven’s ingroup member countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and its outgroup member country China. The sentiment analyses are performed on and compared between different periods of Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s administrations in the United States; Major’s, Blair’s, Brown’s, and Cameron’s cabinets in the United Kingdom; and Kohl’s, Schröder’s, and Merkel’s in Germany. The relationship between China hosting the Olympic Games or its growing economic power and the magazine’s sentiment orientations toward the country is examined. The concept analysis on the articles with extreme positivity or negativity shows that there is no difference between the ingroup and outgroup members in the topics covered in The Economist.