Aibek Makazhanov
Davood Rafiei
ABSTRACT
We study the problem of predicting the political preference of users on the Twitter network, showing that the political preference of users can be predicted from their interaction with political parties. We show this by building prediction models based on a variety of contextual and behavioural features, training the models by resorting to a distant supervision approach and considering party candidates to have a predefined preference towards their parties. A language model for each party is learned from the content of the tweets by the party candidates, and the preference of a user is assessed based on the alignment of user tweets with the language models of the parties. We evaluate our work in the context of Alberta 2012 general election, and show that our model outperforms, in terms of the F-measure, sentiment and text classification approaches and is in par with the human annotators. We further use our model to analyze the preference changes over the course of the election campaign and report results that would be difficult to attain by human annotators.
- F. Benevenuto, G. Magno, T. Rodrigues, and V. Almeida, "Detecting Spammers on Twitter," Jul. 2010. {Online}. Available: http://ceas.cc/2010/papers/Paper%2021.pdfGoogle Scholar
- M. Choy, M. L. F. Cheong, M. N. Laik, and K. P. Shung, "A sentiment analysis of singapore presidential election 2011 using twitter data with census correction," CoRR, vol. abs/1108.5520, 2011.Google Scholar
- M. Conover, B. Gonçalves, J. Ratkiewicz, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer, "Predicting the political alignment of twitter users," in SocialCom/PASSAT, 2011, pp. 192--199.Google Scholar
- M. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, M. Francisco, B. Gonçalves, F. Menczer, and A. Flammini, "Political polarization on twitter," in ICWSM, 2011.Google Scholar
- J. Fleiss et al., "Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters," Psychological Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 5, pp. 378--382, 1971.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Golbeck and D. L. Hansen, "Computing political preference among twitter followers," in CHI, 2011, pp. 1105--1108. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Hu and B. Liu, "Mining and summarizing customer reviews," in KDD, 2004, pp. 168--177. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Livne, M. P. Simmons, E. Adar, and L. A. Adamic, "The party is over here: Structure and content in the 2010 election," in ICWSM, 2011.Google Scholar
- M. Marchetti-Bowick and N. Chambers, "Learning for microblogs with distant supervision: Political forecasting with twitter," in EACL, 2012, pp. 603--612. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Mustafaraj, S. Finn, C. Whitlock, and P. T. Metaxas, "Vocal minority versus silent majority: Discovering the opionions of the long tail," in SocialCom/PASSAT, 2011, pp. 103--110.Google Scholar
- B. O'Connor, R. Balasubramanyan, B. R. Routledge, and N. A. Smith, "From tweets to polls: Linking text sentiment to public opinion time series," in ICWSM, 2010.Google Scholar
- H. S. Rad, A. Makazhanov, D. Rafiei, and D. Barbosa, "Leveraging editor collaboration patterns in wikipedia," in HT, 2012, pp. 13--22. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Sparks, "Birds of a feather tweet together: Partisan structure in online social networks, presented at the 2010 meeting of the midwest political science association."Google Scholar
- M. Thelwall, K. Buckley, G. Paltoglou, D. Cai, and A. Kappas, "Sentiment strength detection in short informal text," JASIST, vol. 61, no. 12, pp. 2544--2558, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Tumasjan, T. O. Sprenger, P. G. Sandner, and I. M. Welpe, "Predicting elections with twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment," in ICWSM, 2010.Google Scholar
- H. Wang, D. Can, A. Kazemzadeh, F. Bar, and S. Narayanan, "A system for real-time twitter sentiment analysis of 2012 u.s. presidential election cycle," in ACL (System Demonstrations), 2012, pp. 115--120. Google ScholarDigital Library
- wikipedia.org, "Alberta general election, 2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_general_election,_2012."Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Predicting political preference of Twitter users
Recommendations
Linguistic Factors Associated With Propagation of Political Opinions in Twitter
In the last decade, social networks have emerged as a significant media platform for dissemination of political information. In this article, we characterize linguistic factors that affect the dissemination of a political message on Twitter. This is ...
Understanding the Political Representativeness of Twitter Users
In this article, we analyze the structure and content of the political conversations that took place through the microblogging platform Twitter in the context of the 2011 Spanish legislative elections and the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. Using a ...
Analyzing and predicting news popularity on Twitter
HighlightsThe spreading of news published by popular news agencies is more time sensitive than general retweets.Retweets of the news burst in few seconds, while general retweets burst in a relatively long time.No previous works focus on the specific ...
Comments