[LINK] Near Real Time Public Opinion Analysis for the Australian Government

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the Australian national University in Canberra, where the 
"OpinionWatch" system for analysis of public opinion is being 
demonstrated. This system is being developed for the Australian 
Government by NICTA. This was tested with data from Senator Lundy's 
Public Sphere Process, Defence Joint Decision Support Centre and 
recently demonstrated to the Prime Minister: 
http://www.katelundy.com.au/2011/12/15/analysing-the-public-sphere-%e2%80%93-data-and-community/

The idea is to be able to get an overall impression of what the 
community thinks on an issue without having to conduct expensive opinion 
polls or long consultation processes. The software can sift through 
thousands of documents and carry out an analysis of the general 
sentiment of the authors.

One interesting outcome of a demonstration analysis of public statements 
from the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader is that Tony Abbot's 
comments about climate change is very focused on "carbon tax" whereas 
Julia Gillard is using a much broader range of terms (which perhaps, I 
suggest, is why the PM is not winning in the opinion polls: the message 
is too confusing).

 From a technical point of view the software is interesting in that it 
has a HTML5 interface and so should be usable on a tablet computer or 
smart phones.

One application for the software might be the analysis of the 
submissions to parliamentary inquiries, or even just the analysis of the 
topic of the inquiry in public blogs. Currently the Parliamentary 
Library prepares summaries of issues of interest to MPs, but these 
generally cover the facts of the situation, not the sentiment and take 
considerable work from expert information analysis to prepare.

ps: The former Parliamentary Librarian will speak at ANU, 4 April 2012, 
11am: http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/3031


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/