Sentiment Analysis of Tweets during Karnataka State Election
2023 Using Hybrid Approach
Pushpa , Department of Data Analytics, Dublin Business School
Abstract
The proliferation of smartphones, fast internet and Twitter forms
an absolute breeding ground for important political discussion
and form an opinion. India is one of the largest democracies in
the world and it would be interesting to see if the opinion formed
over social media is also reflected in elections. This proposal
intends to study sentiment analysis of tweets related to the
Karnataka State elections 2023 using a hybrid approach. The
approach combines both lexicon-based techniques and Machine
learning techniques to improve the correct classification of
sentiments. It involves lexicon-based techniques to pre-process
the data and then apply machine learning algorithms to classify its
sentiment. It will be analyzed if the hybrid approach will
outperform both the lexicon-based and machine-learning
approaches individually in terms of F-1, accuracy, precision and
recall. The findings of the study are useful to understand the
public’s overall opinion toward political parties, candidates and
election issues. Therefore, the political parties can monitor,
evaluate and adjust their communication tactics and tailor their
campaign strategies. This study is extremely useful to political
analysts who can predict election results with a reasonable degree
of accuracy.
Index Terms— Sentiment analysis, Hybrid approach, lexicon-
based technique, Machine learning techniques
Introduction
India is the world’s largest and most vibrant democracy of the
world. The reason lies in the diversity with a population of 1.3
billion with 28 states and 8 union territories, 22 official
languages, and 6 national and 57 regional parties. The motivation
to carry out sentiment analysis for Karnataka State Election 2023
lies in the complex electoral system of India where several
political parties and alliances competing for seats in parliament/
assembly making it difficult to predict the outcome of the
election.
In the Indian political context, the Karnataka State election 2023
is a significant event as Karnataka is one of the key states in India
with a total of 28 Lok Sabha seats. The upcoming state assembly
election will be held to elect the 224 members of the Legislative
Assembly of Karnataka. The election is expected to take place in
May 2023, and several political parties have already started
preparing for the same. In the light of the motivation to study the
sentiment of tweets from Karnataka State Election 2023, the
study proposes the following hypothesis –
Hypothesis 1: Will the sentiment expressed towards political
parties in tweets during the Karnataka State Election 2023 be
reflective of the actual election results?
Hypothesis 2: How does the sentiment of tweets related to the
Karnataka State Election 2023 vary across different regions of
the state?
10610624@mydbs.ie
Hypothesis 3: Can a hybrid approach for sentiment analysis of
tweets during Karnataka State Election 2023 improve the
accuracy of sentiment classification and provide insights into the
public opinion and sentiment towards political parties and
candidates?
Background Work
Sentiment analysis is a process of determining the polarity of a
text, which can be positive, negative, or neutral. Previous studies
have employed both supervised machine learning techniques that
rely on features extracted from corpora for classifier training and
lexicon-based methods that use pre-defined lexicon resources
such as sentiWordNet, AFFIN, Text Blob, and LIWC.
A large number of the literature review is available in the public
domain, and a few have been studied before proposing this
proposal.
Ligthart et al wrote a review paper “Systematic reviews in
sentiment analysis: a tertiary study” where he referenced about
200 research papers published between 2013-2019 presents an
overview of the current application of machine learning models
and corresponding challenges in sentiment analysis.
Santos et al. wrote a review paper “A Survey on the use of Data
and opinion mining in social media to political electoral outcomes
prediction ” where they conducted a systematic review on social
media-based mechanisms used to predict political outcomes,
the quantity of collected data, the specific social media used, the
collection period, the algorithms and approaches adopted. And
limitations and lines for further research on this topic.
Methodology
The methodology for the proposed study would involve the
following steps:
i. Collection of tweets related to the Karnataka State Election
2023 using Twitter API (Application Programming
Interface)
ii. Data Pre-processing of collected tweets by removing noise,
performing tokenization, stop word removal, and stemming to
obtain clear text data.
A detailed EDA of election tweets is proposed to answer the
following -
a) Exploring tweets based on geo data
b) Languages used in tweets
c) State wise tweets in favor of various political parties
d) Count of tweets per day/week
e) Sentiment of tweets with regard to political parties
f) What are the most trending issues among the public during
election?
.
iii Sentiment Analysis Using a hybrid approach which uses
lexicon-based techniques to pre-process the data and then
applying an appropriate machine learning algorithms to
classify the sentiment of those tweets
iv. Evaluation of the performance of the hybrid approach by
measuring accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score using
appropriate evaluation metrics
v. Comparison of performance of the hybrid approach with other
sentiment analysis approaches used in previous studies to
determine its effectiveness in analysing sentiments of tweets
during the Karnataka State Election 2023.
vi. Visualization of the sentiment analysis results using
appropriate charts and graphs to provide insights into the public
sentiment towards the election candidates and parties.
vii Interpretation of results to provide insights into the strengths
and weaknesses of different candidates and parties, the issues that
matter most to the public, and the overall sentiment towards the
election.
Results & Discussion
The comparative study critically analyses the results of traditional
and hybrid models, based on the appropriate performance matrix.
Additionally, the study analyses the factors that contribute to the
accuracy of each model. The ultimate goal of the study would be
to identify the effectiveness of the hybrid approach for sentiment
analysis of tweets related to the Karnataka State Election 2023
Future Work
The proposed approach relies solely on Twitter data for sentiment
analysis. Future work may integrate data from other sources, such
as news articles to improve the accuracy of sentiment analysis.
Additionally, analysing the impact of sentiment on election
outcomes, such as voter turnout or party vote share would further
advance the field of sentiment analysis.
References
[1]Alexander Ligthart, C Cata, B Tekinerdogan, “Systematic reviews in sentiment analysis: a
tertiary study” Artificial Intelligence Review (2021) 54:4997–5053,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-021-09973-
[2] P Chauhan, N Sharma, G Sikka,” The emergence of social media data and sentiment
analysis in election prediction “Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing
(2021) 12:2601–2627, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-02423-
[3] J S. Santos, F Bernardini1,·A Paes, “A survey on the use of data and opinion mining in
social media to political electoral outcomes prediction”, Social Network Analysis and Mining
(2021) 11:103, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00813-4