In assessment of election results via Artificial Intelligence and emotional analysis of political tweets its IT department went ahead Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

The Political Barometer developed in Artificial Intelligence lab and Information analysis of Department of Informatics AUTH. It is one political opinion estimation software using political tweets analysis referring to political parties, which are collected and analyzed daily. The analysis is done with Artificial Intelligence methods (emotional analysis of texts). It concerns political parties of the Hellenic Parliament for which sufficient data can be automatically collected from Twitter (in alphabetical order HELLENIC SOLUTION, KINAL, KKE, MERA25, ND, SYRIZA). The Political Barometer uses a modern political market, i.e. Twitter (according to the declarations of the owner Mr. E. Musk).

Protia SW

As can be seen from the results, in today’s voting intention estimate ND receives 31.7% and SYRIZA 26.3%, while PASOK comes third with 8.7%. At 6% is the KKE, at 3.6% MeRA25 and at 3.3% Hellenic Solution.

As for her estimate of voting intention today, with reference to the valid ones, ND receives 36.3%, while SYRIZA 30.1%. KINAL reaches 10% and KKE reaches 6.9%, while MeRA25 is at 4.2% and Hellenic Solution at 3.7%.

As stated in the relevant information, it can replace polls, offering the following benefits: f

  1. The analysis of public opinion is daily, with a direct response to political stimuli
  2. The cost is almost zero.
  3. There is no serious deviation from the poll results, according to the analysis so far (May 2022-May 2023). The deviation is about 0.5-1% for small and large parties respectively.
  4. It provides important political information. E.g. from the total number of tweets it appears that:
  • The political leaders’ phone battle had little impact on the Twitter world.
  • The case of Polakis’ possible non-candidacy surpassed even the tragedy of Tempi in resonating on Twitter.
  • It became apparent very early on that the political impact of the Tempe tragedy was rather temporary.

The Political Barometer is an international first. There is no other such system where the results are freely available to all, daily, by viewing at the Political Barometer link HERE.

Estimated voting intention today:

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Estimate of voting intention today, with reference to valid ones:

  • Estimate of voting intention, with reference to the valid ones (13/5/2023)
  • Estimate of voting intention today (includes unclear vote).
  • Time series of voting intention (estimated with poll and Twitter data)
  • Political trends (estimation of voting intention from political tweets only).
  • Results of sentiment analysis of political tweets of all parties.
  • Total number of political tweets.
  • Political events (peaks in the number of tweets).
  • Average deviation of Political Barometer from polls 5/2022-5/2023.

Twitter audiences have special characteristics. E.g., they are mostly young, tend to be negative in their comments (commonly, cursing). Some parties (eg SYRIZA) have a larger and comparatively better presence on Twitter, in relation to their appeal to the general electorate. The Political Barometer, with appropriate use of past polls and Machine Learning methods, can successfully reduce the analysis to the general electorate (or rather the pollster) and make relevant predictions.

The Political Barometer software has been under evaluation for a year. In the absence of objective truth (results of real elections, because there were no elections in the last year), it uses as ‘objective truth’ to refer to the general electorate all polls of all companies up to 1 week ago. Therefore, although it uses polls only for education, while it uses tweets to predict election results, any criticism of polls is also partially valid for the Political Barometer.

According to AUTH, the Political Barometer method is here to stay: the more it is fed with correct and abundant data (and the more people use social media as a platform for political dialogue), the better it will become.

The research and development of the Political Barometer has been carried out by the Computational Politics research group (parts of AIIA.CVML) of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis Laboratory (AIIA Lab) of the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the supervision of AUTH professor Mr. I. Pita.

It will also give… an exit poll

Although, as stated, not exactly a polling method, the Political Barometer has stopped issuing forecasts on May 13, while he will republish his predictions once the polls are closed.