Vocal Minority Versus Silent Majority: Twitter Data for Greek General Elections and Tweets on German Foreign Policy

The role of a vocal minority versus a silent majority in Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining is examined and compared in two cases, namely in a familiar domain of national elections and domestic politics and in a less familiar domain from a different country and language community concerning public opinion in foreign policy. In the first case, the integration of the vocal minority versus silent majority factor in Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining generated correct results, corresponding to the national election outcome. In the second case, it is discussed how a smaller “snap shot” dataset produced results reflecting tendencies expressed in politics and public opinion in conjunction to the parameters of the socio-cultural and language community concerned.