A Sentiment Analysis of Brazilian Elections Tweets
André Luis Cristiani, Douglas D. Lieira, Heloisa A. Camargo · 2020
The internet connection is present in people’s lives all the time, through smartphones, tablets, computers, among others. The use of social networks is increasingly common around the world. Many companies and people use them to spread products and services and publish opinions, facts that have turned the social networks into powerful sources of information on various topics. Identifying these feelings is a great strategy for many types of decision making. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to collect messages from a specific social network, in this case Twitter, referring to the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections and classify them as: positive, negative and neutral, in order to discover a possible relationship between opinions of social network users and the final outcome of the elections. For this, a corpus was built, preprocessed and evaluated by two different machine learning approaches: Naive Bayes and SVM (Support Vector Machine). The results showed that this social network is a good source of information to perform sentiment analysis and that the number of tweets classified as positive have a strong relationship with the researchers and the final result of the 2018 elections.