Sentiment Severity on Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) Data of Natural disasters

Abstract

Social media emerged as one of the key components to reach disaster affected people, as they supplement planning and operational coordination. Sentiment analysis was expended to identify, extract or characterize subjective information, such as opinions, expressed in a tweet. The sentiment expressed is analyzed and is classified as positive or negative sentiment, which is not versatile enough to capture the exact sentiment conveyed by the user. Opinion mining is a machine learning process used to extract information conveyed by the user in the form of text. In this paper, the lexical analysis to sentiment analysis of twitter data is employed. Conventionally, the sentiment is conveyed using the polarity of the data but in this paper, sentiment intensity is employed to convey the sentiments. Performing sentiment analysis on tweets gives us the sentiment intensity conveyed by the user, which in turn is used to calculate the severity of the disaster event specified by the user. Further, it is also used to classify the tweets based on their severity. This paper proposes a methodology to extract relevant sentiment information from Location Based Social Network (LBSN) and suggests a unique scale to classify this information to help disaster management authority.