AthPPA: A Data Visualization Tool for Identifying Political Popularity over Twitter

Abstract

Sentiment Analysis is an actively growing field with demand in both scientific and industrial sectors. Political sentiment analysis is used when a data analyst wants to determine the opinion of different users on social media platforms regarding a politician or a political event. This paper presents Athena Political Popularity Analysis (AthPPA), a tool for identifying political popularity over Twitter. AthPPA is able to collect in-real-time tweets and for each tweet to extract metadata such as number of likes, retweets per tweet etc. Then it processes their text in order to calculate their overall sentiment. For the calculation of sentiment analysis, we have implemented a sentiment analyzer that is able to identify the grammatical issues of a sentence as well as a lexicon of negative and positive words designed specifically for political sentiment analysis. An analytic engine processes the collected data and provides different visualizations that provide additional insights on the collected data. We show how we applied our framework to the three most prominent Greek political leaders in Greece and present our findings there.

Keywords

• data visualization
• lexicon-based sentiment analysis
• political sentiment analysis
• natural language processing