Scotland will continue to be part of the United Kingdom after voting no to independence tomorrow.
That is the prediction of Microsoft’s search engine Bing, at least, which believes the ‘No’ vote will beat the ‘Yes’ vote by 51.9% to 48.1% tomorrow.
It came up with the outcomes by using its Bing Predicts system, which previously correctly forecasted that Germany would win this summer’s World Cup.
Microsoft is beta testing the machine learning-based service in the UK, which has used a variety of web and social data – as well as team metrics in the World Cup – to predict the winners of American Idol and this summer’s football tournament.
The Bing team wrote in a blog: "For the prediction, we start with the trends and sentiment determined from the web and social data, and we then adjust for biases and try to understand the true opinion expressed by a population most representing the actual voters themselves."
Its "sentiment detector" also tagged neutral keywords on social media to identify undecided voters, updating predictions regularly to reflect the latest vote.
Bing also collated the highest search queries from Scotland over the past six months to analyse their concerns regarding the referendum.
They are:
– CURRENCY: what will happen to the currency in Scotland if it does become independent?
– GEO-POLITICAL: can the UK veto an independent Scotland EU membership
– NATIONALITY/IDENTITY: will Scottish people lose their British nationality after independence
– BANKS: what happens to RBS if Scotland becomes independent?
– OIL: who gets the oil with independence?
– BBC: what would happen to the BBC in an independent Scotland?
– Other interesting terms: what will happen to the open golf after Scottish independence? And: how will Scottish independence affect law firms?
