A company that uses artificial intelligence to forecast elections has concluded that the race between President Donald Trump and Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is much closer than most polls suggest.
Expert.ai, a company based in Modena, Italy and Rockville, Maryland, found by using A.I.-based “sentiment analysis,” that Biden is ahead of Trump by about three percentage points, 50.2% to 47.3%. The company previously used a political forecasting model to predict that the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union in 2016, according to Fortune.
The company’s chief executive, Walt Mayo, told Fortune that the model grants the company "insight into what voters are discussing and how their attitudes are evolving as we get closer to the election,” as well as "the issues of most importance to voters and the emotions in social media posts that may drive decision-making at the polls."
The model analyzes social media activity about the candidates, about 500,000 Twitter posts from the past week, using the artificial intelligence technique natural language processing to focus on the amount of positive or negative emotions expressed in those posts. The A.I. categorized the posts using 84 different emotional labels, which are either “positive” or “negative,” and were then ranked by intensity and multiplied by how many times they occurred for each candidate.
Expert.ai found that Trump accounted for almost 60% of the posts they analyzed, while Biden made up less than 17%. However, posts about Biden tended to be much more positive, focusing on “success” and “hope,” while posts about Trump were more negative, with higher scores among emotions like “fear” and “hatred.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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