Mining Wikileaks Data to Identify Sentiment Polarities in International Relationships

The infamous Wikileaks cables are a large-scale resource for analyzing international relationships. We use sentiment analysis on this dataset to extract opinion polarities in the international scenario. We use an unsupervised approach based on standard sentiment lexicon with modifiers to mine opinion polarities among the cables to and from embassies/consulates of USA. Sharp changes in opinion polarities are mapped to international events happening around the time of the cable at the location of the embassy/consulate, and a positive/negative correlation is drawn. The dataset consists of 232,410 cables from 1966 up to October 2009 concerning 272 embassies and consulates across the world. The top 28 of the spikes/dips in polarity changes coming from 20 embassies/consulates are then evaluated. Our results show that there is a strong correlation (76 %) between our findings and sentiments surrounding actual events. For example, our study was able to correctly identify suicide terrorist attacks outside the American embassy in Casablanca. It could also highlight a cable that referred to a terrorist who was later arrested in New Delhi possessing secret documents related to Indian Army.