A user modeling pipeline for studying polarized political events in social media

A user modeling pipeline for studying polarized political events in social media

Napoli, R. (Politecnico di Milano)
Ertugrul, Ali Mert (Middle East Technical University)
Bozzon, A. (TU Delft Web Information Systems)
Brambilla, Marco (Politecnico di Milano)

Pautasso, Cesare (editor)
Systä, Kari (editor)
Rodriguez, Juan Manuel Murillo (editor)
Sanchez-Figueroa, Fernando (editor)

2018

This paper presents a user modeling pipeline to analyze discussions and opinions shared on social media regarding polarized political events (e.g., public polls). The pipeline follows a four-step methodology. First, social media posts and users metadata are crawled. Second, a filtering mechanism is applied to filter spammers and bot users. As a third step, demographics information is extracted out of the valid users, namely gender, age, ethnicity and location information. Finally, the political polarity of the users with respect to the analyzed event is predicted. In the scope of this work, our proposed pipeline is applied to two referendum scenarios (independence of Catalonia in Spain and autonomy of Lombardy in Italy) in order to assess the performance of the approach with respect to the capability of collecting correct insights on the demographics of social media users and of predicting the poll results based on the opinions shared by the users. Experiments show that the method was effective in predicting the political trends for the Catalonia case, but not for the Lombardy case. Among the various motivations for this, we noticed that in general Twitter was more representative of the users opposing the referendum than the ones in favor.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:460e750a-149a-4019-9c4f-788e5320a85f

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_9

Springer, Cham

9783030030551

Current Trends in Web Engineering - ICWE 2018 International Workshops, MATWEP, EnWot, KD-WEB, WEOD, TourismKG, 2018, Revised Selected Papers

18th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2018, 2018-06-05 → 2018-06-08, Caceres, Spain

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 0302-9743, 11153 LNCS

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 R. Napoli, Ali Mert Ertugrul, A. Bozzon, Marco Brambilla