This repository contains the dataset of politicians' Twitter handles we have compiled for India and the United States. These handles were collected as a part of the NivaDuck project (NivaDuck is the Marathi word for selector). Please cite the paper from the link above if you plan to use the data in publications. Detailed credits for collaborators are provied in the Team Section.
We are publishing the list of Twitter handles compiled as of July 22, 2020. This list is subject to updation (addition, removal and change in metadata) as politicians change parties, more false positives are identified, and new politicians arrive. The metadata consists of state and party annotations for about half the Indian handles and state annotations almost all of the USA handles. For the remaining accounts, we are adding and verifying metadata and will update this repository at regular intervals.
For the India set, roughly 17K handles were found by NivaDuck. These were complemented, verified and annotated (with metadata) by human coders. Additionally roughly 18K handles were manually added from amongst friends of these politicians by Sachita Nishal, Venkatesh Thapan, and Divyanshu Kukreti. The latter do not have state and party annotations yet and will be added in due course. Barring the seed set for the US data, the remaining accounts were gathered using NivaDuck and were verified and annotated by Anmol Panda and A'ndre Gonawela. We are working to complement this set using the same procedure as the India dataset to get a more comprehensive dataset of political figures in the US.
Currently NivaDuck, trained for high precision, suffers from low recall and misses out on many politicians, necessiating significant human effort (see paper for details). We aim to work towards improving the current classification pipeline and adding new functionality to alleviate the precision-recall trade-off.