Analysis of information retrieved from microblogging services such as Twitter
can provide valuable insight into public sentiment in a geographic region. This
insight can be enriched by visualising information in its geographic context.
Two underlying approaches for sentiment analysis are dictionary-based and
machine learning. The former is popular for public sentiment analysis, and the
latter has found limited use for aggregating public sentiment from Twitter
data. The research presented in this paper aims to extend the machine learning
approach for aggregating public sentiment. To this end, a framework for
analysing and visualising public sentiment from a Twitter corpus is developed.
A dictionary-based approach and a machine learning approach are implemented
within the framework and compared using one UK case study, namely the royal
birth of 2013. The case study validates the feasibility of the framework for
analysis and rapid visualisation. One observation is that there is good
correlation between the results produced by the popular dictionary-based
approach and the machine learning approach when large volumes of tweets are
analysed. However, for rapid analysis to be possible faster methods need to be
developed using big data techniques and parallel methods.Comment: http://www.blessonv.com/research/publicsentiment/ 9 pages. Submitted
to IEEE BigData 2013: Workshop on Big Humanities, October 201