Summaries from International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media on ShortScience.org

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

ICWSM is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media. This overall theme includes research in new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing social media. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through social media while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

2010 1

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From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series
O'Connor, Brendan and Balasubramanyan, Ramnath and Routledge, Bryan R. and Smith, Noah A.
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media - 2010 via Local Bibsonomy
Keywords: sentiment, twitter, analysis

[link] Summary by AcaWiki 8 years ago

This study finds that poll data on consumer confidence and presidential job approvals can be approximated with straightforward sentiment analysis of Twitter data.

The idea of aggregate sentiment is particularly interesting--where the errors are treated as noise which is expected to cancel itself out in aggregate. They point to Hopkins and King (2010) to show that standard text analysis techniques are inappropriate for assessing aggregate populations. Further, they provide some evidence from their own experiment: they mention that filtering out "will" (which is treated as positive sentiment despite being a verb sense, since they don't do POS tagging). However, they mention one caution: errors could potentially correlate with information of interest, such as if certain demographic groups might tweet in ways that are harder to analyze.