The Role of Text Pre-processing in Sentiment Analysis

It is challenging to understand the latest trends and summarise the state or general opinions about products due to the big diversity and size of social media data, and this creates the need of automated and real time opinion extraction and mining. Mining online opinion is a form of sentiment analysis that is treated as a difficult text classification task. In this paper, we explore the role of text pre-processing in sentiment analysis, and report on experimental results that demonstrate that with appropriate feature selection and representation, sentiment analysis accuracies using support vector machines (SVM) in this area may be significantly improved. The level of accuracy achieved is shown to be comparable to the ones achieved in topic categorisation although sentiment analysis is considered to be a much harder problem in the literature

Social Emotion Mining Techniques for Facebook Posts Reaction Prediction

As of February 2016 Facebook allows users to express their experienced emotions about a post by using five so-called `reactions'. This research paper proposes and evaluates alternative methods for predicting these reactions to user posts on public pages of firms/companies (like supermarket chains). For this purpose, we collected posts (and their reactions) from Facebook pages of large supermarket chains and constructed a dataset which is available for other researches. In order to predict the distribution of reactions of a new post, neural network architectures (convolutional and recurrent neural networks) were tested using pretrained word embeddings. Results of the neural networks were improved by introducing a bootstrapping approach for sentiment and emotion mining on the comments for each post. The final model (a combination of neural network and a baseline emotion miner) is able to predict the reaction distribution on Facebook posts with a mean squared error (or misclassification rate) of 0.135.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures and accepted at ICAART 2018. (Dataset: https://github.com/jerryspan/FacebookR

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software