Event Outcome Prediction using Sentiment Analysis and Crowd Wisdom in Microblog Feeds

--Sentiment Analysis of microblog feeds has attracted considerable interest in recent times. Most of the current work focuses on tweet sentiment classification. But not much work has been done to explore how reliable the opinions of the mass (crowd wisdom) in social network microblogs such as twitter are in predicting outcomes of certain events such as election debates. In this work, we investigate whether crowd wisdom is useful in predicting such outcomes and whether their opinions are influenced by the experts in the field. We work in the domain of multi-label classification to perform sentiment classification of tweets and obtain the opinion of the crowd. This learnt sentiment is then used to predict outcomes of events such as: US Presidential Debate winners, Grammy A ward winners, Super Bowl Winners. We find that in most of the cases, the wisdom of the crowd does indeed match with that of the experts, and in cases where they don't (particularly in the case of debates), we see that the crowd's opinion is actually influenced by that of the experts. I NTRODUCTION Over the past few years, microblogs have become one of the most popular online social networks. Microblogging websites have evolved to become a source of varied kinds of information. This is due to the nature of microblogs: people post real-time messages about their opinions and express sentiment on a variety of topics, discuss current issues, complain, etc. Twitter is one such popular microblogging service where users create status messages (called "tweets"). With over 400 million tweets per day on Twitter, microblog users generate large amount of data, which cover very rich topics ranging from politics, sports to celebrity gossip. Because the user generated content on microblogs covers rich topics and expresses sentiment/opinions of the mass, mining and analyzing this information can prove to be very beneficial both to the industrial and the academic community. Tweet classification has attracted considerable attention because it has become very important to analyze peoples' sentiments and opinions over social networks.