Identifying A Target Scope of Complaints on Social Media

A complaint is uttered when reality violates one’s expectations. Research on complaints, which contributes to our understanding of basic human behavior, has been conducted in the fields of psychology, linguistics, and marketing. Although several approaches have been implemented to the study of complaints, studies have yet focused on a target scope of complaints. Examination of a target scope of complaints is an important topic because the functions of complaints, such as evocation of emotion, use of grammar, and intention, are different when the target scope of complaints is different. We first tackle the construction and release of a complaint dataset of 6,418 tweets by annotating Japanese texts collected from Twitter with labels of the target scope. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/sociocom/JaGUCHI. We then benchmark the annotated dataset with several machine learning baselines and obtain the best performance of 90.4 F1-score in detecting whether a text was a complaint or not, and a micro-F1 score of 72.2 in identifying the target scope label. Finally, we conducted case studies using our model to demonstrate that identifying a target scope of complaints is useful for sociological analysis.