Twitter as a corpus for sentiment analysis and opinion mining

Abstract

Microblogging today has become a very popular communication tool among Internet users. Millions of users share opinions on different aspects of life everyday. Therefore microblogging web-sites are rich sources of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Because microblogging has appeared relatively recently, there are a few research works that were devoted to this topic. In our paper, we focus on using Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform, for the task of sentiment analysis. We show how to automatically collect a corpus for sentiment analysis and opinion mining purposes. We perform linguistic analysis of the collected corpus and explain discovered phenomena. Using the corpus, we build a sentiment classifier, that is able to determine positive, negative and neutral sentiments for a document. Experimental evaluations show that our proposed techniques are efficient and performs better than previously proposed methods. In our research, we worked with English, however, the proposed technique can be used with any other language.