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Main Authors: Melnyk, Misha, Dolny, Mitchell, Elkind, Joshua D., Tjhin, A. Michael, Chebium, Saisha, VanBerlo, Blake, Russell, Annelise, Buehlmann, Michelle M., Hoey, Jesse
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03247
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author Melnyk, Misha
Dolny, Mitchell
Elkind, Joshua D.
Tjhin, A. Michael
Chebium, Saisha
VanBerlo, Blake
Russell, Annelise
Buehlmann, Michelle M.
Hoey, Jesse
author_facet Melnyk, Misha
Dolny, Mitchell
Elkind, Joshua D.
Tjhin, A. Michael
Chebium, Saisha
VanBerlo, Blake
Russell, Annelise
Buehlmann, Michelle M.
Hoey, Jesse
contents Policy setting in the USA according to the ``Garbage Can'' model differentiates between ``problem'' and ``solution'' focused processes. In this paper, we study a large dataset of US Senator postings on Twitter (1.68m tweets in total). Our objective is to develop an automated method to label Senatorial posts as either in the problem or solution streams. Two academic policy experts labeled a subset of 3967 tweets as either problem, solution, or other (anything not problem or solution). We split off a subset of 500 tweets into a test set, with the remaining 3467 used for training. During development, this training set was further split by 60/20/20 proportions for fitting, validation, and development test sets. We investigated supervised learning methods for building problem/solution classifiers directly on the training set, evaluating their performance in terms of F1 score on the validation set, allowing us to rapidly iterate through models and hyperparameters, achieving an average weighted F1 score of above 0.8 on cross validation across the three categories using a BERTweet Base model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03247
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Classifying Problem and Solution Framing in Congressional Social Media
Melnyk, Misha
Dolny, Mitchell
Elkind, Joshua D.
Tjhin, A. Michael
Chebium, Saisha
VanBerlo, Blake
Russell, Annelise
Buehlmann, Michelle M.
Hoey, Jesse
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
Policy setting in the USA according to the ``Garbage Can'' model differentiates between ``problem'' and ``solution'' focused processes. In this paper, we study a large dataset of US Senator postings on Twitter (1.68m tweets in total). Our objective is to develop an automated method to label Senatorial posts as either in the problem or solution streams. Two academic policy experts labeled a subset of 3967 tweets as either problem, solution, or other (anything not problem or solution). We split off a subset of 500 tweets into a test set, with the remaining 3467 used for training. During development, this training set was further split by 60/20/20 proportions for fitting, validation, and development test sets. We investigated supervised learning methods for building problem/solution classifiers directly on the training set, evaluating their performance in terms of F1 score on the validation set, allowing us to rapidly iterate through models and hyperparameters, achieving an average weighted F1 score of above 0.8 on cross validation across the three categories using a BERTweet Base model.
title Classifying Problem and Solution Framing in Congressional Social Media
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03247