June 08, 2017
Twitter Sentiments Yield Results Similar to Public Opinion Polls
Noah Smith, an assistant professor of Language Technologies, and his team of researchers found that sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages were similar to those of well-established public opinion polls. "With seven million or more messages being tweeted each day, this data stream potentially allows us to take the temperature of the population very quickly," Smith said. "The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we're still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls." For more on the research, which will be presented May 25 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, DC, visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/May/may11_twitterpolls.shtml
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