As Long as You Name My Name Right: Social Circles and Social Sentiment in the Hollywood Hearings

摘要

The Hollywood Blacklist was based on a series of interviews conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), trying to identify members of the communist party. We use various NLP algorithms in order to automatically analyze a large corpus of interview transcripts and construct a network of the industry members and their "naming" relations. We further use algorithms for Sentiment Analysis in order to add a psychological dimension to the edges in the network. In particular, we test how different types of connections are manifested by different sentiment types and attitude of the interviewees. Analysis of the language used in the hearings can shed new light on the motivation and role of network members.