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Election polls were a disaster this year. Here’s how AI could help

Expert.ai, a software company specializing in natural-language processing, used AI to analyze social media posts about Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the months leading up to the 2020 election. The company’s AI uses sentiment analysis to understand the emotions expressed in social media posts and then project how that could translate into votes.

Expert.ai’s system looked at nearly half a million tweets and other social media comments made before the election. Using natural language processing, the AI categorized the sentiment expressed in social media posts according to more than 80 different emotional labels. These labels were given an intensity ranking and then multiplied by the number of occurrences for each candidate.