A Practical Guide to Sentiment Analysis (Socio-Affective Computing)

Sentiment analysis research has been started long back and recently it is one of the demanding research topics.  Research activities on Sentiment Analysis in natural language texts and other media are gaining ground with full swing. But, till date, no concise set of factors has been yet defined that really affects how writers’ sentiment i.e., broadly human sentiment is expressed, perceived, recognized, processed, and interpreted in natural languages. The existing reported solutions or the available systems are still far from perfect or fail to meet the satisfaction level of the end users. The reasons may be that there are dozens of conceptual rules that govern sentiment and even there are possibly unlimited clues that can convey these concepts from realization to practical implementation. Therefore, the main aim of this book is to provide a feasible research platform to our ambitious researchers towards developing the practical solutions that will be indeed beneficial for our society,business and future researches as well.

This edited work presents studies and discussions that clarify the challenges and opportunities of sentiment analysis research. While sentiment analysis research has become very popular in the past ten years, most companies and researchers still approach it simply as a polarity detection problem. In reality, sentiment analysis is a ‘suitcase problem’ that requires tackling many natural language processing subtasks, including microtext analysis, sarcasm detection, anaphora resolution, subjectivity detection and aspect extraction.

In this book, the authors propose an overview of the main issues and challenges associated with current sentiment analysis research and provide some insights on practical tools and techniques that can be exploited to both advance the state of the art in all sentiment analysis subtasks and explore new areas in the same context. Readers will discover sentiment mining techniques that can be exploited for the creation and automated upkeep of review andopinion aggregation websites, in which opinionated text and videos are continuously gathered from the Web and not restricted to just product reviews, but also to wider topics such as political issues and brand perception.

The book also enables researchers to see how affective computing and sentiment analysis have a great potential as a sub-component technology for other systems. They can enhance the capabilities of customer relationship management and recommendation systems allowing, for example, to find out which features customers are particularly happy about or to exclude from the recommendations items that have received very negative feedbacks. Similarly, they can be exploited for affective tutoring and affective entertainment or for troll filtering and spam detection in online social communication.