SES: Sentiment Elicitation System for Social Media Data

Abstract—Social Media is becoming major and popu-lar technological platform that allows users discussing and sharing information. Information is generated and man-aged through either computer or mobile devices by one person and consumed by many other persons. Most of these user generated content are textual information, as So-cial Networks(Facebook, LinkedIn), Microblogging(Twitter), blogs(Blogspot, Wordpress). Looking for valuable nuggets of knowledge, such as capturing and summarizing sentiments from these huge amount of data could help users make informed decisions. In this paper, we develop a sentiment identification system called SES which implements three dif-ferent sentiment identification algorithms. We augment basic compositional semantic rules in the first algorithm. In the second algorithm, we think sentiment should not be simply classified as positive, negative, and objective but a continuous score to reflect sentiment degree. All word scores are calculated based on a large volume of customer reviews. Due to the special characteristics of social media texts, we propose a third algorithm which takes emoticons, negation word posi-tion, and domain-specific words into account. Furthermore, a machine learning model is employed on features derived from outputs of three algorithms. We conduct our experiments on user comments from Facebook and tweets from twitter. The results show that utilizing Random Forest will acquire a better accuracy than decision tree, neural network, and logistic regression. We also propose a flexible way to represent document sentiment based on sentiments of each sentence contained. SES is available online. Keywords-Social media, sentiment, rule, machine learning I

Same data, different conclusions : radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis

In this crowdsourced initiative, independent analysts used the same dataset to test two hypotheses regarding the effects of scientists’ gender and professional status on verbosity during group meetings. Not only the analytic approach but also the operationalizations of key variables were left unconstrained and up to individual analysts. For instance, analysts could choose to operationalize status as job title, institutional ranking, citation counts, or some combination. To maximize transparency regarding the process by which analytic choices are made, the analysts used a platform we developed called DataExplained to justify both preferred and rejected analytic paths in real time. Analyses lacking sufficient detail, reproducible code, or with statistical errors were excluded, resulting in 29 analyses in the final sample. Researchers reported radically different analyses and dispersed empirical outcomes, in a number of cases obtaining significant effects in opposite directions for the same research question. A Boba multiverse analysis demonstrates that decisions about how to operationalize variables explain variability in outcomes above and beyond statistical choices (e.g., covariates). Subjective researcher decisions play a critical role in driving the reported empirical results, underscoring the need for open data, systematic robustness checks, and transparency regarding both analytic paths taken and not taken. Implications for organizations and leaders, whose decision making relies in part on scientific findings, consulting reports, and internal analyses by data scientists, are discussed