POPmine: Tracking Political Opinion on the Web

TL;DR

POPmine is a system that automatically collects and analyzes media content from news, blogs, and Twitter to track political opinions, recognizing topics, actors, and sentiment over time.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive system for multi-source political opinion mining and sentiment analysis on web-based media.

Findings

Successfully integrates data from diverse media sources.

Provides indicators of mention frequency and polarity.

Enables tracking of political opinion dynamics.

Abstract

The automatic content analysis of mass media in the social sciences has become necessary and possible with the raise of social media and computational power. One particularly promising avenue of research concerns the use of opinion mining. We design and implement the POPmine system which is able to collect texts from web-based conventional media (news items in mainstream media sites) and social media (blogs and Twitter) and to process those texts, recognizing topics and political actors, analyzing relevant linguistic units, and generating indicators of both frequency of mention and polarity (positivity/negativity) of mentions to political actors across sources, types of sources, and across time.