TY - GEN
T1 - A user modeling pipeline for studying polarized political events in social media
AU - Napoli, Roberto
AU - Ertugrul, Ali Mert
AU - Bozzon, Alessandro
AU - Brambilla, Marco
N1 - Accepted Author Manuscript
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058285064&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_9
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85058285064
SN - 9783030030551
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 101
EP - 114
BT - Current Trends in Web Engineering - ICWE 2018 International Workshops, MATWEP, EnWot, KD-WEB, WEOD, TourismKG, 2018, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Pautasso, Cesare
A2 - Systä, Kari
A2 - Rodriguez, Juan Manuel Murillo
A2 - Sanchez-Figueroa, Fernando
PB - Springer
CY - Cham
T2 - 18th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2018
Y2 - 5 June 2018 through 8 June 2018
ER -