Election trolling: analyzing sentiment in tweets during pakistan elections 2013

Arjumand Younus, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Muhammad Saeed, Nasir Touheed, Colm O'Riordan, Gabriella Pasi

Abstract: The use of Twitter as a discussion platform for political issues has led researchers to study its role in predicting election outcomes. This work studies a much neglected aspect of politics on Twitter namely "election trolling" whereby supporters of different political parties attack each other during election campaigns. We also propose a novel strategy to detect terms that are usually not associated with sentiment but are introduced by supporters of political parties to attack the opposing party. We demonstrate a lack of political maturity as evidenced through high percentage of political attacks in a developing region such as Pakistan.