Today, we’ll be exploring patterns in a corpus of genuine and fake news collected in 2016 by Buzz Feed and scored for veracity by professional journalists. As you might imagine, the corpus contains very partisan perspectives; individual articles may contain disturbing language and viewpoints. In the initial code example below, you will need to have downloaded the data set and have created a database called articles
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We’ll begin our investigation of natural language processing by using Aylien, which bill itself as a “News Intelligence Platform,” to classify these articles, analyze their topics, identify the people, places, things they discuss, and to discern the sentiment or tone of the articles. If you would like to follow along, please sign up for a free API key.