Using Big Data to Monitor the Brexit Campaign

Two of our researchers from the University of Essex are using big data from online sources to track the debate around the Brexit Campaign.

Professor Massimo Poesio and Professor Udo Kruschwitz from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering are using sentiment analysis tools to contribute to a living poll which shows how people feel ahead of the EU Referendum.

SENSE-EU showcases online conversation summarisation technology developed within the SENSEI European Project. Every day, almost 200,000 posts across multilingual media sources on the topic of the UK EU Referendum are captured and automatically analysed by SENSEI technology. A team of human and machine data curators generate this analysis and teach the algorithms to continue improving.

You can find out more about the SENSEI European Project, the multilingual media sources they monitor and the algorithms used at: SENSE-EU. An article has also been published on The Conversation that discusses the accuracy of social media in determining voting results. 

Read the related research paper: The SENSEI Project: Making Sense of Human Conversations