Sentiment detection in social networks and in collaborative learning environments

Daily millions of messages appear on the web, which is becoming a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The computational study of opinions, feelings and emotions expressed in a text often relates to the identification of agreement or disagreement with statements, contained in comments or reviews, that convey positive or negative feelings. The detection and analysis of sentiment in textual communication is a topic attracting attention also in the context of collaborative learning in social networks, being learners actively engaged in presenting and defending ideas and opinions, as well as exchanging moods about courses with peers. In this paper, we investigate the adoption of a probabilistic approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as Sentiment Grabber. Through this approach, for a set of documents belonging to a same knowledge domain, a graph, the Mixed Graph of Terms, can be automatically extracted. The paper shows how this graph contains a set of weighted word pairs, which are discriminative for sentiment classification. The proposed method has been tested in different context: a standard dataset containing movie reviews; a real-time analysis of social networks posts; a collaborative learning scenario. The experimental evaluation shows how the proposed approach is effective and satisfactory

Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms

This paper is written for (social science) researchers seeking to analyze the wealth of social media now available. It presents a comprehensive review of software tools for social networking media, wikis, really simple syndication feeds, blogs, newsgroups, chat and news feeds. For completeness, it also includes introductions to social media scraping, storage, data cleaning and sentiment analysis. Although principally a review, the paper also provides a methodology and a critique of social media tools. Analyzing social media, in particular Twitter feeds for sentiment analysis, has become a major research and business activity due to the availability of web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Facebook and News services. This has led to an ‘explosion’ of data services, software tools for scraping and analysis and social media analytics platforms. It is also a research area undergoing rapid change and evolution due to commercial pressures and the potential for using social media data for computational (social science) research. Using a simple taxonomy, this paper provides a review of leading software tools and how to use them to scrape, cleanse and analyze the spectrum of social media. In addition, it discussed the requirement of an experimental computational environment for social media research and presents as an illustration the system architecture of a social media (analytics) platform built by University College London. The principal contribution of this paper is to provide an overview (including code fragments) for scientists seeking to utilize social media scraping and analytics either in their research or business. The data retrieval techniques that are presented in this paper are valid at the time of writing this paper (June 2014), but they are subject to change since social media data scraping APIs are rapidly changing

Comprehensive Review of Opinion Summarization

The abundance of opinions on the web has kindled the study of opinion summarization over the last few years. People have introduced various techniques and paradigms to solving this special task. This survey attempts to systematically investigate the different techniques and approaches used in opinion summarization. We provide a multi-perspective classification of the approaches used and highlight some of the key weaknesses of these approaches. This survey also covers evaluation techniques and data sets used in studying the opinion summarization problem. Finally, we provide insights into some of the challenges that are left to be addressed as this will help set the trend for future research in this area.unpublishednot peer reviewe