Politirate quantitatively assesses politicians based on public news related to them and their Twitter posts. We do this using sentiment analysis and natural language processing on a politician’s tweets and publicly available news articles. Citizens who use our app will remain informed in an unbiased way and can decide if political candidates will be a good politician. At the same time, politicians can use our app to determine if the messages they are posting online are hurting or helping their public image.
Each tweet is assigned a score from -5 to 5. Each news article is also assigned a score from -5 to 5, but the title is assigned a score independent from the description of the news article. The scores for the title and description are then averaged, and the article is assigned this score. Then, the score for the politician is calculated using the following equation: politician score = news score * 2 + Twitter score * 0.25. This ensures that every politician’s score is between -11 and 11. Most politicians have a score close to 0, which is neutral. Politicians who tend to use words and phrases with very positive connotations will tend to have a higher rating.