Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data: Understanding Public Opinion before the 15th General Elections in Malaysia

Abstract

Amid the ever-growing social media content, sentiment analysis is a technique that is necessary for analyzing public opinion. This paper aims to discover what sentiment prevailed and what reaction took place preceding the election. This paper also presents the results of a study that applied sentiment analysis to Twitter data relating to the 15th General Elections of Malaysia. This research reviews several sentiment analysis techniques based on Twitter data. Using the method of analyzing 1566 tweets, including re-tweets and replies, gathered between November 12th and November 18th, 2022, the findings give us an understanding of the level of emotions that were tweeted by the users of Twitter towards the 15th general election in Malaysia. The results indicate that the sentiments expressed in the analysed tweets are distributed as follows: slightly positive (41%), positive (31%), neutral (24%), and slightly negative (4%).