Analysis of the Italian Tweet Political Sentiment in 2014 European Elections

Nowadays, the increasing popularity of micro-blogging websites such as Twitter, makes available an impressive amount of information about users and their social behavior. These media contents give the opportunity to study opinions, sentiments, attitudes, reactions towards particular events. In this paper the sentiment of Italian Twitter users in the period of 2014 European elections has been investigated, and an analysis of the opinions regarding parties and leaders along a period of three months is presented. Moreover, hashtag networks have been generated and clustered, and communities of users, who posted tweets containing the hashtags appearing in these clusters, have been extracted with the aim of unveiling and tracking thematic discussion groups.