The
Royal Statistical Society’s Merseyside Local Group are pleased to announce a special event jointly hosted with the University of Liverpool in celebration of Liverpool hosting the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in May.
The Eurovision Song Contest has showcased a wealth of European cultural phenomena for over 65 years, though not many realise just how much statistical input there is to the contest and how much data it generates. We will welcome speakers showing the links between maths, statistics, and Eurovision in uncovering what statistical patterns within lyrics and voting can tell us about the contest, as well as trying to find what makes that elusive “winning formula”!
The event will take place on-campus at the University of Liverpool and will be freely available to watch live on our YouTube channel and will appear on the homepage when the event starts.
Please register only if attending in-person so we can budget for refreshments.
Speakers:
Adam Price – ‘Identifying Voting Blocs In The Eurovision Tele Vote’
Dr Anna Aljanaki (Lancaster University) – ‘Eurovision contest statistics over the years: the sound, the lyrics, the winners’
Alan Wise (Lancaster University) – ‘Say Wonderful Things, A Sentiment Analysis of Eurovision Lyrics’
Dr Andrew Gustar (The Open University) – ‘The joys of Eurovision Scoring’
The
Royal Statistical Society’s Merseyside Local Group are pleased to announce a special event jointly hosted with the University of Liverpool in celebration of Liverpool hosting the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in May.
The Eurovision Song Contest has showcased a wealth of European cultural phenomena for over 65 years, though not many realise just how much statistical input there is to the contest and how much data it generates. We will welcome speakers showing the links between maths, statistics, and Eurovision in uncovering what statistical patterns within lyrics and voting can tell us about the contest, as well as trying to find what makes that elusive “winning formula”!
The event will take place on-campus at the University of Liverpool and will be freely available to watch live on our YouTube channel and will appear on the homepage when the event starts.
Please register only if attending in-person so we can budget for refreshments.
Adam Price – ‘Identifying Voting Blocs In The Eurovision Tele Vote’
Since 2014 the Eurovision Song Contest has released voting statistics from each nation's Tele Vote. Using this data, we gain a window into the voting habits of different nations and answer the question, 'Are there voting blocs in the Eurovision Song Contest?'
Dr Anna Aljanaki (University of Tartu) – ‘Eurovision contest statistics over the years: the sound, the lyrics, the winners’
Eurovision song contest has been held since 1956 and is very well documented, including all the music, lyrics and voting patterns. The voting patterns have been under some statistical scrutiny, but the music itself also has trends to be uncovered over time. In this talk we will look at the data from Eurovision competition using music information retrieval methods.
Alan Wise (Lancaster University) – ‘Say Wonderful Things, A Sentiment Analysis of Eurovision Lyrics’
Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to analyse text data and identify its intent. In this talk, I use standard natural language processing tools to examine whether lyrics in Eurovision songs are positive, negative or neutral in sentiment. I will describe how I used different tools to score the sentiment of each song dating back to the first contest in 1956. I will chat through the sentiment of some of my favourite, and your favourite, songs and discuss trends through the decades of the contest, including the songs submitted for the 2023 contest.
Dr Andrew Gustar (The Open University) – ‘The joys of Eurovision Scoring’
This talk will explore the voting patterns of recent contests under the current scoring system, describing a regular statistical structure underlying the jury scores; explaining why the public will usually disagree with, and overrule, the juries; establishing what is unusual about the Eurovision preferences of Italian televoters; and mapping musical tastes across Europe and beyond.