Overview

Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis determines whether a piece of writing is positive, negative, or neutral. It can also detect specific emotions like anger, joy, or sadness.

Levels of Analysis

  • Document Level: Determining the sentiment of an entire review or article.
  • Sentence Level: Analyzing individual sentences.
  • Aspect-Based: Identifying sentiment towards specific features of a product (e.g., 'The battery life is great, but the screen is dim').

Techniques

  • Lexicon-based: Using dictionaries of words with assigned sentiment scores.
  • Machine Learning: Training classifiers (like SVMs or Naive Bayes) on labeled datasets.
  • Deep Learning: Using LSTMs or Transformers for more nuanced contextual understanding.

Applications

  • Monitoring social media for brand reputation.
  • Analyzing customer feedback and reviews.
  • Market research and political polling.

Related Terms