Portuguese sentiment analysis applied to a reality show using Twitter and NLP in real time

Abstract

The motivation for this study was to measure the impact that Twitter publications have on voting and the choosing of winners. To this end, an experimental study was carried out based on a set of data collected from tweets (published on Twitter) related to the reality show “Big Brother - A Revolução”, broadcast on a television station in Portugal, TVI. The procedure adopted for conducting the experiment consisted of creating a completely self-contained service, built from scratch for this project, and the correspondent implementation, in order to allow the collection, storage, cleaning, pre-processing and analysis of as many tweets as possible, as long as they are associated with the program. A tool to analyze the polarity (positive, negative or neutral) of the sentiment was implemented and applied to the phrase (or phrases) contained in the tweet and stored in a database. Then, running in the database, the tweets were divided according to how they referred to one or more competitors. Throughout the time that the reality show existed, the results of this experiment were public presented in daily/weekly summaries and posted on Twitter through a “Twitter bot”.