Twitter sentiment analysis for the estimation of voting intention in the 2017 Chilean elections

Abstract

In this paper, we apply sentiment analysis methods in the context of the first round of the 2017 Chilean elections. The purpose of this work is to estimate the voting intention associated with each candidate in order to contrast this with the results from classical methods (e.g., polls and surveys). The data are collected from Twitter, because of its high usage in Chile and in the sentiment analysis literature. We obtained tweets associated with the three main candidates: Sebastián Piñera (SP), Alejandro Guillier (AG) and Beatriz Sánchez (BS). For each candidate, we estimated the voting intention and compared it to the traditional methods. To do this, we first acquired the data and labeled the tweets as positive or negative. Afterward, we built a model using machine learning techniques. The classification model had an accuracy of 76.45% using support vector machines, which yielded the best model for our case. Finally, we use a formula to estimate the voting intention from the number of positive and negative tweets for each candidate. For the last period, we obtained a voting intention of 35.84% for SP, compared to a range of 34–44% according to traditional polls and 36% in the actual elections. For AG we obtained an estimate of 37%, compared with a range of 15.40% to 30.00% for traditional polls and 20.27% in the elections. For BS we obtained an estimate of 27.77%, compared with the range of 8.50% to 11.00% given by traditional polls and an actual result of 22.70% in the elections. These results are promising, in some cases providing an estimate closer to reality than traditional polls. Some differences can be explained due to the fact that some candidates have been omitted, even though they held a significant number of votes.