Title: Political sentiment analysis of tweets before and after the Greek elections of May 2012

Authors: Katia Lida Kermanidis; Manolis Maragoudakis

Addresses: Department of Informatics, Ionian University, 7 Tsirigoti Square, 49100 Corfu, Greece ' Department of Information and Communication Engineering, University of the Aegean, 83200 Karlovasi, Samos, Greece

Abstract: Political sentiment analysis using social media content has attracted significant interest in the last years. The present work utilises limited linguistic resources in a knowledge-poor approach to political sentiment identification from Greek tweets, posted a few days before and a few days after the Greek parliamentary elections of May 6th, 2012. Rather than the accurate prediction of the election results, the main focus of the proposed work is the investigation of the alignment between web and actual political sentiment in a bi-directional manner: the impact/reflection of the tweets' sentiment on the elections as well as the impact of the elections' results on web sentiment, and its shift around such a major political event.

Keywords: web sentiment; sentiment alignment; political sentiment analysis; social networks; opinion mining; Twitter; Greek elections; Greece; social media; parliamentary elections.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNM.2013.059090

International Journal of Social Network Mining, 2013 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.298 - 317

Received: 24 Jun 2013
Accepted: 06 Nov 2013
Published online: 02 Jul 2014 *

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