An evaluation of sentiment analysis for mobile devices

Abstract

Sentiment analysis has become a key tool to extract knowledge from data containing opinions and sentiments, particularly, data from online social systems. With the increasing use of smartphones to access social media platforms, a new wave of applications that explore sentiment analysis in the mobile environment is beginning to emerge. However, there are various existing sentiment analysis methods and it is unclear which of them are deployable in the mobile environment. In this paper, we provide the first of a kind study in which we compare the performance of 14 sentence-level sentiment analysis methods in the mobile environment. To do that, we adapted these methods to run on Android OS and then, we measure their performance in terms of memory, CPU, and battery consumption. Our findings unveil methods that require almost no adaptations and run relatively fast as well as methods that could not be deployed due to excessive use of memory. We hope our effort provides a guide to developers and researchers interested in exploring sentiment analysis as part of a mobile application and can help new applications to be executed without the dependency of a server-side API. We also share the Android API that implements all the 14 sentiment analysis methods used in this paper.