Understanding the mood of social media messages

Abstract

Social media is a valuable source of information when seeking to understand community opinion and sentiment about issues of public interest. Such analysis is usually based on sentiment or emotion processing using machine learning techniques or references a curated lexicon of words to measure the emotive intensity being expressed. The lexicon approach can be limited by the sparsity problem, where the lexicon words are not present in the text being processed, and context issues, where the lexicon words have different meanings in the domain under investigation. We have developed a novel technique based on word embeddings to mitigate these issues and present a case study showing its application, where the mood expressed by the community on social media about the Centenary of Armistice in Australia was determined in near real-time.