Building a Sentiment Corpus of Tweets in Brazilian Portuguese

The large amount of data available in social media, forums and websites motivates researches in several areas of Natural Language Processing, such as sentiment analysis. The popularity of the area due to its subjective and semantic characteristics motivates research on novel methods and approaches for classification. Hence, there is a high demand for datasets on different domains and different languages. This paper introduces TweetSentBR, a sentiment corpora for Brazilian Portuguese manually annotated with 15.000 sentences on TV show domain. The sentences were labeled in three classes (positive, neutral and negative) by seven annotators, following literature guidelines for ensuring reliability on the annotation. We also ran baseline experiments on polarity classification using three machine learning methods, reaching 80.99% on F-Measure and 82.06% on accuracy in binary classification, and 59.85% F-Measure and 64.62% on accuracy on three point classification.Comment: Accepted for publication in 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018

Live Blogging and Social Media Curation: Challenges and Opportunities for Journalism

Blogging and social media’s contribution to a realignment of the relationship between journalists and their audiences is discussed by Einar Thorsen in Live Blogging and Social Media Curation. Journalists are facing challenges to preserve traditional standards, such as verification of information and sources, whilst also capitalising on the opportunities afforded by the immediacy, transparency and interactive nature of online communication. Thorsen analyses these issues through two case studies: one focuses on ‘live’ blogging and elections, and a second looks at the role of social media in the Arab Spring. He demonstrates how journalists face new challenges in relation to social media curation, whilst the emergent forms and practices also present a wealth of opportunities

Do sentiments influence market dynamics? : A reconstruction of the Brazilian stock market and its mood

Sentiments play an important role in justifying economic actions and are typically presented as being a modern incarnation of expectations that influence financial markets, whether they be of a Keynesian or other type. For the case of the São Paulo Stock Market Index (IBovespa), this paper investigates whether sentiments, as publically expressed in specialised media, represent a covariate variable which influences stock market returns, and also how market dynamics evolve through time, especially in times of major shocks or recessions. In this study we use a network approach to relate the evolution of asset returns to a sentiments index. Daily data from IBovespa and a Thomson Reuters MarketPsych index are used as fair indicators of the evolution of the Brazilian economy from 2007 to 2015. We prove that changes in market prices affect news more than the reverse.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Analyzing Polarization on Social Media: A Case Study of the 2022 Brazil Presidential Election

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceSocial Media has become a big part of our society and has now a significant role in the relationships between inter and intra-communities. Twitter is now an important communication platform for political campaigns: in the last years, politicians, campaigners, and general users have been extensively using Twitter to promote campaigns and engage in political discussions. Some studies argue that social media can create filter bubbles by limiting the flow of online information, and therefore creating communities where exposure to political diversity is rare. This selective exposure can build echo chambers where individuals only interact with those who have the same opinions as they have and by doing that, they build a polarized community. Identifying, understanding, and mitigating polarization is very important for the democratic process. People should be exposed to different ideas and opinions so they can choose their representatives without being influenced by some portion of the information. This project analyzed political polarization on social media using data from Twitter. Brazil’s presidential election in 2022 was used as a case study. Tweets from the two main candidates were extracted. A Topic Modeling algorithm was used to cluster tweets in topics. An Engagement Graph was built based on the interactions between users, candidates, and topics and was used to compute the Topic Centrality measures. A pre-trained Sentiment Analysis model was used to measure the sentiment polarity of each tweet. In the end, the project analyzed the extracted features and identified which topics were more central to each candidate and how users interact with them. The major conclusion of this work is that polarization in Brazil is more affective than ideological since the user’s sentiments towards topics are not as relevant as the sentiments towards the candidates

The Dilemma of Middle Class Philanthropy: A Summary Report Focusing on the BRIC Countries

A key question for the future of philanthropy emerged from discussions at the consultation meeting in Delhi which formed part of the Bellagio Initiative on the future of philanthropy and development in the pursuit of human wellbeing: what's happening with middle class giving in BRIC countries and how can it contribute effectively to equitable and sustainable development? Two key and difficult questions emerged from the discussions in Delhi which the Resource Alliance felt needed further attention:* 'What is the potential for giving of the growing middle class in BRICS countries?'* 'How can this philanthropy be (made) transformative?'Beyond those important and difficult questions, the Resource Alliance sought 'new knowledge, potential and challenges' on the problem of middle class philanthropy, so commissioned resource papers on middle class philanthropy in Brazil, China, India, and Russia. The papers sought to gather data and analysis on 'the potential of middle class giving in terms of numbers and income groups, growth in last three to five years, professional/educational/ financial background; differing philosophies of giving; the role of religious identities, current motivations and mechanisms for giving .... and the challenges/future options and we can draw from them'.The four resource papers prepared on middle class philanthropy in Brazil, China, India, and Russia noted a number of important themes. Notably, they highlighted the lack of significant data on the middle class and on middle class giving, and the need for more data. Little research thus far, including the resource papers, provides real data on the scope of the middle class and it's giving in these countries. This makes analysis and recommendations both very difficult and highly anecdotal. Furthermore, it is difficult to differentiate 'middle class philanthropy' from other forms of giving by local communities. The resource papers give some hints -- primarily in the area of methods of giving -- but we are left without answers to key questions such as is the newer middle class giving to different causes? In different ways? For different motivations? Changing over time? Since this is a new research area, the resource papers only begin to address these issues, which, we hope, other researchers will take up in the future.The problem of trust and the need for higher levels of accountability and transparency in the charitable community to encourage and sustain donation processes emerges as a constraint on giving, and confidence in giving, in each of the resource papers. Of course, issues of trust, accountability and transparency are not specific to the somewhat artificial category of 'middle class giving'. Yet they need to be further addressed in each of these countries and presumably in many others as well.Like the problem of trust, language, accountability and transparency, the continuing importance of policy and legal frameworks to encourage giving -- all giving, not just from the middle class -- emerges from each resource paper. And like other themes, more facilitative policy and legal frameworks would help to strengthen giving and non-profit service in general, not just among the 'middle class'. The growing importance of social innovation in the giving context, including new forms, structures, institutions and modes of philanthropy emerges in each of the four country contexts. And this may actually -- though, again, the data isn't there -- be something more specific to middle class and wealthy donors