http://leadership.ng/news/politics/399976/edawah-technologies-creates-new-battlefield-2015-campaigns
A Nigeria-based technology firm, Edawah Technologies Limited, has created a new battlefield in the electioneering process in Nigeria.

A statement issued by the Business Technology Manager of the firm, Oladeji Oluwaseyi Ibraheem, on Tuesday noted that attention paid to online political campaign and propaganda had never been this high in Nigeria as it is now.

According to him, the increase in political awareness had also led to massive increase in quality and quantity of online political discussions.

He observed that while some efforts had been made in measuring political buzz using polls, there were other complementary tools yet to be used.

“BuzzMentions Political Index was commissioned to give more insight into what people are discussing about the 2 major Presidential candidates of the 2015 Nigerian Elections, President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari.

“It aims to enhance understanding of political dynamics in Nigeria by measuring the tone and intensity of the online political conversations that are going on in this country.

“Unlike traditional polling, in which participants are specially selected and asked a series of questions, the BuzzMentions Political Index uses advanced natural language processing techniques to mine opinions of people from publicly available posts on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, local and international media,” said Oladeji Oluwaseyi Ibraheem.

It was modeled after ‘Twindex,’ an election enthusiasm tracker built by Twitter for the last US elections.

It is the product of a partnership between BuzzMentions and OpenAmplify. BuzzMentions media monitoring engine scans through news articles (local and international), blogs, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc for mentions of “Goodluck Jonathan” and “Buhari.”

The OpenAmplify Insights engine then analyzes mentions trying to detect the sentiment (emotion), age range of writer and language style.

OpenAmplify is a world-renowned NLP (natural language processing) text analysis engine with over 20 years of NLP research and 15 granted patents.

We are also tracking entities (person, city and organisation) in the posts so we can determine discussion themes.

The results are displayed on a publicly available interactive dashboard with various data blocks on http://election2015.buzzmentions.com.