Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

Internet and the proliferation of smart mobile devices have changed the way information is created, shared, and spreads, e.g., microblogs such as Twitter, weblogs such as LiveJournal, social networks such as Facebook, and instant messengers such as Skype and WhatsApp are now commonly used to share thoughts and opinions about anything in the surrounding world. This has resulted in the proliferation of social media content, thus creating new opportunities to study public opinion at a scale that was never possible before. Naturally, this abundance of data has quickly attracted business and research interest from various fields including marketing, political science, and social studies, among many others, which are interested in questions like these: Do people like the new Apple Watch? Do Americans support ObamaCare? How do Scottish feel about the Brexit? Answering these questions requires studying the sentiment of opinions people express in social media, which has given rise to the fast growth of the field of sentiment analysis in social media, with Twitter being especially popular for research due to its scale, representativeness, variety of topics discussed, as well as ease of public access to its messages. Here we present an overview of work on sentiment analysis on Twitter.Comment: Microblog sentiment analysis; Twitter opinion mining; In the Encyclopedia on Social Network Analysis and Mining (ESNAM), Second edition. 201

TwiSE at SemEval-2016 Task 4: Twitter Sentiment Classification

This paper describes the participation of the team "TwiSE" in the SemEval 2016 challenge. Specifically, we participated in Task 4, namely "Sentiment Analysis in Twitter" for which we implemented sentiment classification systems for subtasks A, B, C and D. Our approach consists of two steps. In the first step, we generate and validate diverse feature sets for twitter sentiment evaluation, inspired by the work of participants of previous editions of such challenges. In the second step, we focus on the optimization of the evaluation measures of the different subtasks. To this end, we examine different learning strategies by validating them on the data provided by the task organisers. For our final submissions we used an ensemble learning approach (stacked generalization) for Subtask A and single linear models for the rest of the subtasks. In the official leaderboard we were ranked 9/35, 8/19, 1/11 and 2/14 for subtasks A, B, C and D respectively.\footnote{We make the code available for research purposes at \url{https://github.com/balikasg/SemEval2016-Twitter\_Sentiment\_Evaluation}.

NileTMRG at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Arabic Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes two systems that were used by the authors for addressing Arabic Sentiment Analysis as part of SemEval-2017, task 4. The authors participated in three Arabic related subtasks which are: Subtask A (Message Polarity Classification), Sub-task B (Topic-Based Message Polarity classification) and Subtask D (Tweet quantification) using the team name of NileTMRG. For subtask A, we made use of our previously developed sentiment analyzer which we augmented with a scored lexicon. For subtasks B and D, we used an ensemble of three different classifiers. The first classifier was a convolutional neural network for which we trained (word2vec) word embeddings. The second classifier consisted of a MultiLayer Perceptron, while the third classifier was a Logistic regression model that takes the same input as the second classifier. Voting between the three classifiers was used to determine the final outcome. The output from task B, was quantified to produce the results for task D. In all three Arabic related tasks in which NileTMRG participated, the team ranked at number one

Multitask Learning for Fine-Grained Twitter Sentiment Analysis

Traditional sentiment analysis approaches tackle problems like ternary (3-category) and fine-grained (5-category) classification by learning the tasks separately. We argue that such classification tasks are correlated and we propose a multitask approach based on a recurrent neural network that benefits by jointly learning them. Our study demonstrates the potential of multitask models on this type of problems and improves the state-of-the-art results in the fine-grained sentiment classification problem.Comment: International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 201

Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness. Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes a novel approach to measure the relative opinion of Twitter users towards public issues in order to accommodate more complex opinion structures and take advantage of the geography pertaining to the public issues. To ensure that this new measure is technically feasible, a modeling framework is developed including building a training dataset by adopting a state-of-the-art approach and devising a new deep learning method called Opinion-Oriented Word Embedding. With a case study of the tweets selected for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of our relative opinion approach and we show how it can aid visual analytics and support opinion predictions. Although the relative opinion measure is proved to be more robust compared to polling, our study also suggests that the former can advantageously complement the later in opinion prediction