Mining the Web to Monitor the Political Consensus
Communication is becoming more and more crucial in the competitive political arena: politicians can monitor electors’ suggestions or claims, or the perception they might have about leaders’ statements, by analyzing blogs, newsgroups and newspapers. They t
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Abstract Communication is becoming more and more crucial in the competitive political arena: politicians can monitor electors’ suggestions or claims, or the perception they might have about leaders’ statements, by analyzing blogs, newsgroups and newspapers. They try to take account of the complexity of public views in order to design populist measures and increase dramatically their consensus. The Web sources are more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable than ever before. But the most valuable information is often hidden and encoded in blog posts or pages, which are often neither structured, nor classified, being free textual. The process of accessing all these raw data, heterogeneous in terms of source and lexicon, and transforming them into information is therefore strongly linked to automatic textual analysis and conceptual synthesis. This paper describes a Sentiment Mining study performed on over 1,000 news articles or forum/blog posts, concerning the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, involved in the escorts’ scandal.
1 Introduction The Web is a huge virtual space where to express and share individual opinions, influencing any aspect of life, with implications for companies and political parties alike. Nowadays communication is becoming more and more crucial in the competitive political arena: politicians and their consultants can monitor electors’ suggestions or claims, or the perception they might have about leaders’ statements and decisions, by analyzing blogs, newsgroups, and newspapers in real time. Spin
F. Neri () C. Aliprandi Synthema Language and Semantic Intelligence, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] F. Camillo Department of Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Economics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] U.K. Wiil (ed.), Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Social Networks 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-0388-3 19, © Springer-Verlag/Wien 2011
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doctors take account of the complexity of public views in order to design populist measures and increase dramatically their leaders’ consensus. The revolution in information technology is making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable, making Open Source Intelligence and Web Sentiment Analysis available at less cost than ever before. The world today is really in the midst of an information explosion. Anyway, the availability of a huge amount of data in Internet and in all the open sources information channels has lead to the well-identified modern paradox: an overload of information means, most of the time, a no usable knowledge. In fact, all the electronic texts are – and will be – written in various native languages, but these documents are relevant even for nonnative speakers. The most valuable information is often hidden and encoded in pages which for their nature are neither structured, nor classified. Nowadays everyone experiences a mounting frustration in the attempt of finding the information of interest, wa
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