Text Classifiers for Political Ideologies

Machine learning techniques have become very popular for a number of text classification tasks, from spam filters to sentiment analysis to topic classification. In this paper, we will apply a number of machine learning techniques to classifying text by the political ideology of the speaker (i.e. Republican or Democrat). This is a potentially useful application of text classification, as when readers read online blogs, political discussions, news/encyclopedia articles, history textbooks, etc., it would be helpful for them to know the ideology of the writer (which is difficult to find especially when the writer is not a politician), as then they can uncover bias, allowing them to get a better perspective of the writing.