Connecting Opinions to Opinion-Leaders: A Case Study on Brazilian Political Protests

Abstract

Social media applications have assumed an important role in decision-making process of users, affecting their choices about products and services. In this context, understanding and modeling opinions, as well as opinion-leaders, have implications for several tasks, such as recommendation, advertising, brand evaluation etc. Despite the intrinsic relation between opinions and opinion-leaders, most recent works focus exclusively on either understanding the opinions, by Sentiment Analysis (SA) proposals, or identifying opinion-leaders using Influential Users Detection (IUD). This paper presents a preliminary evaluation about a combined analysis of SA and IUD. In this sense, we propose a methodology to quantify factors in real domains that may affect such analysis, as well as the potential benefits of combining SA Methods with IUD ones. Empirical assessments on a sample of tweets about the Brazilian president reveal that the collective opinion and the set of top opinion-leaders over time are inter-related. Further, we were able to identify distinct characteristics of opinion propagation, and that the collective opinion may be accurately estimated by using a few top-k opinion-leaders. These results point out the combined analysis of SA and IUD as a promising research direction to be further exploited.