Please join us for the next Krasnow Monday Seminar on 11/26/12.
Refreshments will be served at 3:30pm. Come chat with colleagues
and like-minded researchers and students prior to the talk at 4pm.
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TITLE:
Can You Accurately Gauge Sentiment With Social Media? A Comparison
of Twitter Sentiment to Polling Data from the Nigerian Presidential
Election of 2011
SPEAKER:
Clay Fink
Senior Software Engineer
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
DATE: Monday, November 26, 2012
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Lecture Room (Room 229)
Krasnow Institute Building
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
ABSTRACT:
To what extent can social media be used to augment traditional
opinion polling as a means of gauging political sentiment in the
developing world? We investigate how well Twitter captured public
opinion during the run-up to the 2011 Nigerian Presidential
election by comparing candidate mentions and extracted sentiment to
official election returns and polling data. We found significant
correlations between mentions of candidates and election results,
indicating that Twitter mirrored the regional trends in the data.
However, Twitter was less accurate in estimating mean levels of
support. Analysis of sentiment in tweets mirrored regional trends
less accurately and showed a strong negativity bias against the
incumbent president, although some correct geographic trends were
still evident. This talk will discuss the techniques and
methodologies used to collect Twitter data, extract sentiment from
tweets, and compare this data to polling and election results. This
was work done by Clay Fink, Nathan Bos, Jonathon Kopecky, and Edwina
Liu, all at APL, under a grant from the Office of Naval Research.
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For additional directions or information call 703-993-4333 or browse
to
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/location/ .
The full semester seminar schedule is at
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/blog/category/monday-seminars/upcomingmondayseminars/
.