Political Tweet Sentiment Analysis for Public Opinion Polling

Abstract

Public opinion measurement through polling is a classical political analysis task, e.g. for predicting national and local election results. However, polls are expensive to run and their results may be biased primarily due to improper population sampling. In this paper, we propose two innovative methods for employing tweet sentiment analysis results for public opinion polling. Our first method utilizes merely the tweet sentiment analysis results outperforming multiple well-recognised methods. In addition, we introduce a novel hybrid way to estimate electorally results from both public opinion polls and tweets. This method enables more accurate, frequent, and inexpensive public opinion estimation and is used for estimating the result of the 2023 Greek national election. Our method demonstrated lower deviation from the actual election’s results than the conventional public opinion polls, introducing new possibilities for public opinion estimation using social media platforms.