Sentiment Analysis on Financial News and Microblogs

Sentiment analysis is useful for multiple tasks including customer satisfaction metrics, identifying market trends for any industry or products, analyzing reviews from social media comments. This thesis highlights the importance of sentiment analysis, provides a summary of seminal works and different approaches towards sentiment analysis. It aims to address sentiment analysis on financial news and microblogs by classifying textual data from financial news and microblogs as positive or negative. Sentiment analysis is performed by making use of paragraph vectors and logistic regression in this thesis and it aims to compare it with previously performed approaches to performing analysis and help researchers in this field. This approach achieves state of the art results for the dataset used in this research. It also presents an insightful analysis of the results of this approach

Sentiment analysis and real-time microblog search

This thesis sets out to examine the role played by sentiment in real-time microblog search. The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user query at a given point in time, automated methods are required to enable users to sift through this information. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling the text content in microblog streams. In this thesis we review the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis, with a specific focus on microblogging. We propose a system and method for evaluating the effect of sentiment on perceived search quality in real-time microblog search scenarios. Initially we provide an evaluation of sentiment analysis using supervised learning for classi- fying the short, informal content in microblog posts. We then evaluate our sentiment-based filtering system for microblog search in a user study with simulated real-time scenarios. Lastly, we conduct real-time user studies for the live broadcast of the popular television programme, the X Factor, and for the Leaders Debate during the Irish General Election. We find that we are able to satisfactorily classify positive, negative and neutral sentiment in microblog posts. We also find a significant role played by sentiment in many microblog search scenarios, observing some detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users’ prior topic sentiment