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Re:Heat map of homophobic and racist tweets by jiggy2011 on Monday May 13, 2013 @11:29AM (#5699201)
Some of these words can also have other meanings. For example "fag" is english slang for cigarette and "chink" obviously has other meanings. I also know gay people who prefer the term 'queer' in describing themselves. I guess you could get a lot of "nigger" too by retweeting hip hop lyrics..
Re:Heat map of homophobic and racist tweets by fuzzybassoon on Monday May 13, 2013 @11:32AM (#5699216)
From the 'Details about this map' popup:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing 'hate words' as "negative," this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

Re:Heat map of homophobic and racist tweets by sp332 on Monday May 13, 2013 @11:31AM (#5699207)
That's why they relied on humans to determine whether each tweet was negative.