Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?

The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. …

By contrast, automatic poll prediction sites using Computational Linguistics (CL) techniques to automatically extract information from social media (methods also known as Natural Language Processing, or text mining), by and large correctly predicted that LEAVE would prevail. CONT.

Massimo Poesio & John Bartle, U. of Essex

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