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phil-bell / Political-Opinion-Finder

Program that gather and analyses political opinions from twitter. Then uses natural language analyses to calculate their opinion to compares them to pollster data to calculate difference in opinions between social media opinions and general populace opinions. This is for my 3rd year dissertation project.
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Political Opinion Finder

This is my 3rd year BSc Computer Science Degree Dissertation project. It involves a program that collects Tweets from twitter, analyses them using natural language to calculate their political opinion so it can then be compared general populace opinions from pollster data.

Motivation

The motivation of this project is to investigate into the difference between political opinions shared on online social media to the opinions of the general populace (opinions gathered from pollsters data) by using natural language and big data analyse.

Findings

The findings of the investigation can be found in the paper I wrote on Academia. The TLDR was that majority of Twitter users did side with remain. I go into further detail on why in the paper.

Installation

Clone the repo, install Python 3 and the following Python libraries using pip install:

Install the following from their .whl from the Windows Binary site using pip install:

This is for Windows(I believe they work with normal pip install on Linux).

Create a JSON file with users MongoDB server credentials, use the example file as a guide. If using a local server download MongoDB and leave mongoURL empty in the JSON file.

User must also create a JSON file with there Twitter API credentials, use the example file as a guide.

Operation

Run the following in console/terminal:

python ./main.py

Then select what you would like to do from the menu presented to you.

On first run the program will download the necessary NLTK data (This may take some time). It is advised to use Gather tweets option on first run so there are tweets in the database. The calculation of twitter vs poll opinion difference does take a long time (can be hours on a slower system).

Licence

Copyright (C) 2017 Philip Bell - All Rights Reserved Unauthorized copying of this file, via any medium is strictly prohibited.

Proprietary and confidential.

Written by Philip Bell philhabell@gmail.com, March 2017.

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