Volume 12, Number 4

Political Opinion Analysis in Social Networks: Case of Twitter and Facebook

  Authors

Telesphore TIENDREBEOGO and Yassia ZAGRE, University of Nazi Boni, Burkina Faso

  Abstract

The 21st century has been characterized by an increased attention to social networks. Nowadays, going 24 hours without getting in touch with them in some way has become difficult. Facebook and Twitter, these social platforms are now part of everyday life. Thus, these social networks have become important sources to be aware of frequently discussed topics or public opinions on a current issue. A lot of people write messages about current events, give their opinion on any topic and discuss social issues more and more.

The emergence and enormous popularity of these social networks have led to the emergence of several types of analysis to take advantage of them. One of them is the analysis of opinions in texts. It aims at automatically classifying opinions in order to position them on a sentiment scale, thus allowing to characterize a set of opinions without having to rely on a human to read them. Currently, opinion analysis offers us a lot of information related to public opinion, either in the commercial world or in the political world. Many studies have shown that machine learning techniques, such as the support vector machine (SVM) and the naive Bayes classifier (NB), perform well in this type of classification.

In our study, we first propose an approach for tracking and analyzing political opinions in social networks. Then, we propose a trained and evaluated machine learning model for political opinion classification. And finally, the study aims at setting up a web interface to collect and analyze in real time political opinions from social networks

  Keywords

Opinion analysis, opinion mining, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, text classification, social networks, machine learning, polarity.