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Opinion and Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Users during the 2021 Ecuador Presidential Election

Abstract:

Social media data have been used for opinion and sentiment analysis and seem to have the potential to reflect the political picture of many territories. This paper analyzes the opinions and sentiments of users about the organization and candidates of the 2021 Ecuadorian presidential election to determine whether these can be considered as a relevant factor to pbkp_redict election outcomes in this country. We used a social media analytics methodology with four phases: first two correspond to data acquisition and pre-processing, where Twitter search API was used for fetching election-related tweets that were taken and converted into a structured format; in the third phase, an opinion analysis was performed to offer statistics about the number of tweets and users, hashtags, mentions and, word clouds. In the fourth phase, we verified the emotional attitude of the users regarding the presidential candidates by using sentiment analysis. The results showed that most of the users' opinions reflected positive sentiment about presidential candidate Arauz in the first round. On the other hand, in the second round, presidential candidate Lasso, concerning the first round, captured a more significant positive response from Twitter users, who achieved a closed result over candidate Arauz. Finally, it is concluded that there is a correspondence between positive sentiments expressed in the tweets and the total votes obtained by candidates.