SENTIMENT ANALYSIS FOR TWITTER

Abstract

The proliferation of Web-enabled devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, enables people to communicate, participate and collaborate with each other in various Web communities, viz., forums, social networks, blogs. Simultaneously, the enormous amount of heterogeneous data that is generated by the users of these communities, offers an unprecedented opportunity to create and employ theories & technologies that search and retrieve relevant data from the huge quantity of information available and mine for opinions thereafter. Consequently, Sentiment Analysis which automatically extracts and analyses the subjectivities and sentiments (or polarities) in written text has emerged as an active area of research. With the rise of social networking age, there has been a surge of user generated content. Microblogging sites have millions of people sharing their thoughts daily because of its characteristic short and simple manner of expression. We propose and investigate a paradigm to mine the sentiment from a popular real-time microblogging service, Twitter, where users post real time reactions to and opinions about “everything”. In this thesis, we expound a hybrid approach using both corpus based and dictionary based methods to determine the semantic orientation of the opinion words in tweets. A case study is presented to illustrate the use and effectiveness of the proposed system.