ADAMSS Center, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy.
IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 15;16(4):e0249634. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249634. eCollection 2021.
Twitter is among the most used online platforms for the political communications, due to the concision of its messages (which is particularly suitable for political slogans) and the quick diffusion of messages. Especially when the argument stimulate the emotionality of users, the content on Twitter is shared with extreme speed and thus studying the tweet sentiment if of utmost importance to predict the evolution of the discussions and the register of the relative narratives. In this article, we present a model able to reproduce the dynamics of the sentiments of tweets related to specific topics and periods and to provide a prediction of the sentiment of the future posts based on the observed past. The model is a recent variant of the Pólya urn, introduced and studied in Aletti and Crimaldi (2019, 2020), which is characterized by a "local" reinforcement, i.e. a reinforcement mechanism mainly based on the most recent observations, and by a random persistent fluctuation of the predictive mean. In particular, this latter feature is capable of capturing the trend fluctuations in the sentiment curve. While the proposed model is extremely general and may be also employed in other contexts, it has been tested on several Twitter data sets and demonstrated greater performances compared to the standard Pólya urn model. Moreover, the different performances on different data sets highlight different emotional sensitivities respect to a public event.
推特是最常用于政治传播的在线平台之一,因为它的信息简洁(特别适合政治口号),并且信息传播迅速。尤其是当论点激发了用户的情绪时,推特上的内容会以极快的速度被分享,因此研究推文的情绪对于预测讨论的发展和相关叙事的记录至关重要。在本文中,我们提出了一个能够再现与特定主题和时期相关的推文情绪动态的模型,并能够根据观察到的过去来预测未来帖子的情绪。该模型是 Aletti 和 Crimaldi(2019,2020)提出并研究的 Pólya urn 的一个最新变体,其特点是“局部”增强,即主要基于最近观察结果的增强机制,以及预测均值的随机持续波动。特别是,后一个特征能够捕捉到情绪曲线的趋势波动。虽然所提出的模型非常通用,也可以用于其他情境,但它已经在几个推特数据集上进行了测试,并显示出比标准的 Pólya urn 模型更好的性能。此外,不同数据集上的不同性能突出了对公共事件的不同情绪敏感性。