  Social media users often make explicit predictions about upcoming events.
Such statements vary in the degree of certainty the author expresses toward the
outcome:"Leonardo DiCaprio will win Best Actor" vs. "Leonardo DiCaprio may win"
or "No way Leonardo wins!". Can popular beliefs on social media predict who
will win? To answer this question, we build a corpus of tweets annotated for
veridicality on which we train a log-linear classifier that detects positive
veridicality with high precision. We then forecast uncertain outcomes using the
wisdom of crowds, by aggregating users' explicit predictions. Our method for
forecasting winners is fully automated, relying only on a set of contenders as
input. It requires no training data of past outcomes and outperforms sentiment
and tweet volume baselines on a broad range of contest prediction tasks. We
further demonstrate how our approach can be used to measure the reliability of
individual accounts' predictions and retrospectively identify surprise
outcomes.
