Extracting Strong Sentiment Trends from Twitter Patrick Lai Computer Science Department Stanford University
What? Automatically extract macro trends in strong approval and strong disapproval of presidential performance from tweets
Why? Current public opinion polling methods are expensive and time-consuming Roughly $10,000 to survey 500 adults for 10 minutes
How? Use six months of tweets (from July 2009 through December 2009) Simple lexicon-based approach Subjectivity Lexicon (formal language) SentiStrength (informal language) Emoticons Evaluated against the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll published by Rasmussen Reports
Result! Best result obtained using SentiStrength lexicon (r = 60%)
Thanks!