Date of Original Version
2010
Type
Conference Proceeding
Published In
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Washington, DC, May 2010, forthcoming.
Abstract or Table of Contents
We connect measures of public opinion measured from polls with sentiment measured from text. We analyze several surveys on consumer confidence and political opinion over the 2008 to 2009 period, and find they correlate to sentiment word frequencies in contemporaneous Twitter messages. While our results vary across datasets, in several cases the correlations are as high as 80%, and capture important large-scale trends. The results highlight the potential of text streams as a substitute and supplement for traditional polling.