Communications of the ACM
Make America Tweet Again
Researchers at the University of Utah have developed software that can identify one's sentiments towards current events by analyzing political tweets.
Credit: estorm.org
Software developed by a team of researchers at the University of Utah can identify an individual's feelings toward current events by analyzing political tweets.
The sentiment analysis software was fed more than 1.6 million geotagged tweets from June to October to determine whether states were leaning toward the Republicans or Democrats. Each tweet was analyzed and assigned a score from 0 to 1, with 0 being negative sentiment, 1 being positive, and 0.5 being neutral. The scores were then compiled in a database that calculates a state or county's political affiliation in real time.
To measure the software's accuracy, researchers compared its results to the New York Times Upshot election forecast website and found the analyses to be very similar.
Based on the number of positive tweets posted since June, the software predicts Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election.
The researchers believe their software also could be used to determine the public's feelings toward certain companies by analyzing reviews about products and services.
"With sentiment analysis, it will try to predict the emotions behind every human being when he or she is talking or writing something," says University of Utah doctoral student Debjyoti Paul.
From UNews (UT)
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