Vox Populi
Researchers
- Eric Sanders MA
- Prof. Antal van den Bosch
- Dr Henk van den Heuvel
Time frame
July 2015 - ongoing
Project description
In the Vox Populi project we try to monitor the opinion of the people by scanning social media (primarily Twitter). We are interested in political views and especially in predicting the outcome of elections on the basis of tweets. A preliminary study showed that by just counting tweets in which political parties are mentioned, we can approximate the polls. Because the posters on Twitter are not necessarily a cross-section of the population, we will research a number of filters to adjust this possible discrepancy. The filters we will be looking into are about: Clustering and topic detection (what are posts about?), User profiling (who is posting?), Sentiment analysis (what is the sentiment of messages?), External event detection (are there specific events that influence the people’s posts?), Time windowing (should we put relative weights on counts of tweets near a certain event (election)?)
Keywords
Twitter, Election Forcasting
Contact
Eric Sanders, eric.sanders@ru.nl