A user-centric model of voting intention from Social Media

Abstract

Social Media contain a multitude of user opinions which can be used to predict realworld phenomena in many domains including politics, finance and health. Most existing methods treat these problems as linear regression, learning to relate word frequencies and other simple features to a known response variable (e.g., voting intention polls or financial indicators). These techniques require very careful filtering of the input texts, as most Social Media posts are irrelevant to the task. In this paper, we present a novel approach which performs high quality filtering automatically, through modelling not just words but also users, framed as a bilinear model with a sparse regulariser. We also con..