Detecting subjectivity and tone with automated text analysis tools

There are a variety of tools that can help researchers analyze large volumes of written material. In this post, I'll examine two of these tools: part-of-speech tagging and tone analysis. I'll also show how to use these methods to find patterns in a large set of Facebook posts created by members of Congress. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is a process that labels each word in a sentence with an algorithm's best guess for the word's part of speech (for example, noun, adjective or verb). This is based on both the definition of each word and the context in which it appears.