How Popular or Unpopular Have Your Leaders Been - Popularity Tracking and Trend Analysis of Socio-Political Figures

Online news media can serve as a very useful resource in terms of tracking the popularity and trend analyses of socio-political figures. The closest technology developed so far in this regard is Google Trends which is however based on the number of searches conducted by the users on the person or figure. And this is not necessarily a measure of popularity – the searches conducted could well be a random search. In this work, we define popularity (growing and diminishing) in terms of the sentiment scores received by the individual statements or sentences in the online news text with respect to some named-entity or socio-political figure. Based on the sentiment analysis and the named-entity extraction, we plot time-series line graphs that represent the popularity and trend analysis of the respective named-entities. The plots were verified with the help of individual opinion surveys and the conformance was more than 80% which signals that our proof-of-concept is viable and works. In the future, we will be extending the work to Nepali based on whatever has been achieved for English news media texts. We also will be improving the current individual module’s performances for English.