Modeling Indian General Elections: Sentiment Analysis of Political Twitter Data

Twitter is a microblogging website where users read and write short messages on various topics every day. Political analysis using social media is getting attention of many researchers to understand the public opinion and trend especially during election time. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on semantics and context aware rules to detect the public opinion and further predict election results. We crawled the political tweets during the general election in India, and further evaluate our proposed approach against the election results. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed rules in determining the sentiment of the political tweets.