Counterfactual (noun)
Definition: the tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.
Effects: it starts off with disappointment, then one will be able to uncover insights or knowledge that can be used to enhance future performance, leading to a better outcome in life.
Counterfacto is a small software tool that can analyse search results on twitter to highlight counterfactual statements on certain topics.
This tool is used by PIEnews.eu researchers for sentiment analysis about poverty and other related topics, to understand actual stories elaborated as counterfactual.
We deem such a tool as a useful experiment, considering the importance of counterfactual analysis for political sentiment assessments and focus on news stories.
Python is required along the following packages:
python-twitter python-nltk
Your distro may have an outdated nltk (less than 3.2) without the
perceptron module, in that case an update from pip is needed:
pip install nltk --upgrade
After installing the necessary python modules, run make, which will
then download the needed data for nltk, and tell you how to use your
twitter credentials in counterfacto
To run counterfacto along with its web interface, you will need additional dependencies:
python-flask
usage: ./counterfacto [-a account] [-f tweetfile] [-s searchterm]
The web interface can be ran with (port defaults to 5000):
usage: ./counterfacto-web [-p port]
- Learning Representations for Counterfactual Inference (2016)
- Bounding and Minimizing Counterfactual Error (2016)
- Counterfactuals in the Language of Social Media: A Natural Language Processing Project in Conjunction with the World Well Being Project (2015)
Counterfacto is Copyright (C) 2016-2017 by the Dyne.org Foundation as part of the PIEnews project
Software written by Ivan J. parazyd@dyne.org with contributions by Denis Roio jaromil@dyne.org
This source code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This source code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Please refer to the GNU Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Public License along with this source code; if not, write to: Free Software Foundation, Inc., Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement nr. 687922