(From left) Dr. Othman Al-Thawadi, Dr. Kamilla Swart, and Dr. James She - Sada Insight's research team leads from Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Qatar University in Doha.
Doha: An artificial intelligence (AI)-based system that can provide an ultrafast sentiment analysis, search, statistics and alerts on various aspects of a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup was on Wednesday launched by a group of researchers from the Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and Qatar University in Doha.
According to the researchers, Sada (Arabic for 'echo') Insight: AI for Sport Media and Events was borne out of a research project about “Sentiment Analysis on FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Using Artificial Intelligence and Twitter”, by Dr. James She and Dr. Kamilla Swart.
This project was initially funded by the Supreme Committee of Delivery and Legacy and CyPhy Limited, and later on collaborated with Michael Linley, Victoria University, and Dr. Othman Al-Thawadi, Qatar University.
"The technology, methodology and system from the research can provide us the ultrafast AI-based Sentiment Analysis, Search, Statistics and Alerts on various aspects of a sport mega-event like the FIFA World Cup. Hence, the media channels, reporters, organisers and even individual professionals could acquire an almost real-time summary and timely ideas about wide-ranging topics and incidents perceived by the public about a sport event", stated the report of the research.
Social media is an important source for retrieving public sentiment, with Twitter one of the most popular international platforms for social media.
More than 400 million tweets are posted every day on Twitter, and more than half a billion tweets were obtained in the previous World Cup. This large dataset allows the public reaction to an event like the World Cup to be analyzed, providing information on public perceptions and attitudes. This research investigates the relationship between the sentiment based on Twitter tweets and the World Cup 2022.
“The unique capabilities of our AI technologies and Data system - Sada, developed in this project are the ultrafast access and continuous insights about the sentiments for different aspects of a mega sport event by analyzing the growing amount and complex content of tweets. So far, over 1 million tweets highly relevant to the World Cup event, as the first in the community, are collected and analyzed. The AI system, Sada, will collect more highly-related tweets every day, and then continuously analyze and report the sentiments of the identified concepts and keywords from newly accumulated tweets containing text, emoji or even user shared images later on using advanced machine learning techniques and system technologies,” highlighted Dr. James She, the project lead.
These tweets are only collected with the relevant hashtags or keywords about the Qatar World Cup 2022. Through our AI and data-driven Sada system and the derived methodologies, we discovered the sentiments and fun facts of some features important to the sentiments about the period before the World Cup. The result shows that people are positive about the upcoming World Cup.
Other breakthroughs and powerful features of Sada system include the intelligent analysis of social media languages, daily mobile alerts, and summarized insight of total and daily tweet amount, average sentiment, and smart information visualization.
“We are excited about the capability of Sada system and the generated insight to assist with better management and decision-making across all phases of event bidding, planning and implementation,” expressed Dr. Othman Al-Thawadi. “Moreover, Sada system and the produced insight has applicability across different types and sizes of special events, ranging for sport to even non-sport, mega- and annual sport events,” he added.
“The initial groundwork of this project was a legacy of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup has presented an opportunity to evolve the analysis of public sentiment using AI technologies and massive data from social media that can provide real-time insights in order to create smarter events,” underscored Dr. Kamilla Swart, who initiated the 2010 FIFA World Cup Research Agenda and has been part of several research initiatives aimed at enhancing knowledge of sport mega-events in the Middle East North Africa region, and Qatar in particular.
For future work, the collaborative project team will investigate the public sentiments by advancing novel AI, data and system technologies from HBKU to help discover other key aspects or even predicting the golden ball winner of this World Cup.
For example, football players’ sentiment could reflect their on-field performances, and the higher the sentiment could help us to track and predict the winner. Since many tweets can involve complicated sentences, and even contain trending multimedia content like emojis, images, or even video, the involved AI technologies, system, and methodologies in Sada is envisioned to provide much more accurate and earlier insight about the public’s sentiments of any mega sport event faster than hearing your sound echo!
