As democracies and social networks grow, there is an ever-increasing demand for polling, sentiment analysis on social networks, and voting advice applications (VAAs). A few folks, like the author of this book, hypothesize that politicians want the citizens of a country to remain in poverty so that ordinary citizens can be exploited. Lack of knowledge and information and elements such as psychological warfare can lead a group of politicians to subjugate a population.

The book defines VAAs:

Web-based online tools that provide a voting recommendation by positioning on the visual landscape candidates/parties together with voters, indicating which candidate/party is the closest to a particular voter based on the answers of policy issues statements.

It acknowledges the fact that VAAs are thoroughly exploited during elections. Chapter 2 provides a list of VAAs successfully implemented in Europe. A critical aspect of a VAA is that it can successfully correlate a community to a political organization or a candidate. In many ways, a VAA is an expert system that encompasses algorithms, invites tacit knowledge, involves embedded implicit knowledge, and hopefully invites explicit knowledge.

An emerging classification framework method is that of analyzing the contents of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter posts and other such mediums and outlets. Data science researchers usually attempt to find if content published on social media is being forwarded, liked, or disliked. Statistical methods such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have been used successfully for this purpose. Figure 3.1 illustrates a list of methods, techniques, and recommendation types used for classifying recommendation systems. The book provides emphasis on sentiment analysis to successfully implement recommendations in the right direction. Finally, the author looks at software architecture and associated analysis techniques for implementing VAAs.

Overall, this is a well-written book that provides lot of necessary insights to readers. The methods and techniques used to implement VAAs will continue to evolve and improve. In this context, I encourage the author to think about the next edition of this book.