Sentiment Analysis for the Social Media: A Case Study for Turkish General Elections

Abstract

The ideas expressed in social media are not always compliant with natural language rules, and the mood and emotion indicators are mostly highlighted by emoticons and emotion specific keywords. There are language independent emotion keywords (e.g. love, hate, good, bad), besides every language has its own particular emotion specific keywords. These keywords can be used for polarity analysis for a particular sentence. In this study, we first created a Turkish dictionary containing emotion specific keywords. Then, we used this dictionary to detect the polarity of tweets that are collected by querying political keywords right before the Turkish general election in 2015. The tweets were collected based on their relatedness with three main categories: the political leaders, ideologies, and political parties. The polarity of these tweets are analyzed in comparison with the election results.