Associating intent with sentiment in weblogs

Abstract

People willingly provide more and more information about themselves on social media platforms. This personal information about users’ emotions (sentiment) or goals (intent) is particularly valuable, for instance, for monitoring tools. So far, sentiment and intent analysis were conducted separately. Yet, both aspects can complement each other thereby informing processes such as explanation and reasoning. In this paper, we investigate the relation between intent and sentiment in weblogs. We therefore extract*90,000 human goal instances from the ICWSM 2009 Spinn3r dataset and assign respective sentiments. Our results indicate that associating intent with sentiment represents a valuable addition to research areas such as text analytics and text understanding.