Exploring the Effectiveness of Twitter at Polling the United States 2016 Presidential Election

被引:11
作者
Heredia, Brian [1 ]
Prusa, Joseph D. [1 ]
Khoshgoftaar, Taghi M. [1 ]
机构
[1] Florida Atlantic Univ, Dept Comp & Elect Engn & Comp Sci, Boca Raton, FL 33431 USA
来源
2017 IEEE 3RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COLLABORATION AND INTERNET COMPUTING (CIC) | 2017年
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
sentiment analysis; election prediction; twitter;
D O I
10.1109/CIC.2017.00045
中图分类号
TP301 [理论、方法];
学科分类号
081202 ;
摘要
Tweets are frequently used to express opinions, specifically when the topic of choice is polarizing, as it is in politics. With many variables effecting the choice of vote, the most effective method of determining election outcome is through public opinion polling. We seek to determine whether Twitter can be an effective polling method for the 2016 United States general election. To this aim, we create a dataset consisting of approximately 3 million tweets ranging from September 22nd to November 8th related to either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. We incorporate two approaches in polling voter opinion for election outcomes: tweet volume and sentiment. Our data is labeled via a convolutional neural network trained on the sentiment140 dataset. To determine whether Twitter is an indicator of election outcome, we compare our results to three polls conducted by various reputable sources during the 13 days before the election. Our results show that when using tweet sentiment, we obtain similar margins to polls conducted during the election period and come close to the actual popular vote outcome.
引用
收藏
页码:283 / 290
页数:8
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