This document discusses sentiment analysis and monitoring social media to understand public opinion. It notes that online communications inherently contain subjective opinions and facts. While facts have business value, opinions often masquerade as facts. The document explores questions companies and governments might ask about public sentiment and how it relates to topics, products, events and competitors. It also discusses challenges in sentiment analysis like distinguishing opinions from facts, handling ambiguity and analyzing sentiment at different levels.

1. Sentiment in Social Media: The Genie in the Bottle Seth Grimes Alta Plana Corporation 301-270-0795 -- http://altaplana.com -- @sethgrimes Monitoring Social Media -- Boston October 5, 2010

3. Three assertions: Human communications, online & off, are inherently subjective. Online facts & opinions have business value. Opinion often masquerades as Fact.

4. Facts and Feelings The unemployment rate is 9.7%. Unemployment is WAY TOO HIGH!! The unemployment rate is higher than it was two years ago (5.1%). Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday that the global recession will "surely be the longest and deepest" since the 1930s, adding that the Obama administration's Troubled Asset Relief Program will be insufficient to plug the yawning financial gap. [Reuters, Feb 18, 2009] [underlining added] Bernanke is doing a better job than Greenspan. www.google.com/publicdata

8. (How) Can we link opinion & intent?Who are opinion leaders? How does sentiment propagate across multiple channels?

9. Information access w/structure, sentiment: User intent? Sentiment Sentiment+

10. “In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.” -- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html “In the recap of [Searchology] from Google’s Matt Cutts, he tells us that: ‘If you sort by reviews, Google will perform sentiment analysis and highlight interesting comments.’ -- Bill Slawski, “Google's New Review Search Option and Sentiment Analysis,” http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1488

12. For better information access, understand user intent. User intent?

13. We have a decision support need. We= Consumers Marketers Competitors Managers Decision support requires tools beyond general-purpose search/information access…

14. Counting term hits, in one source, at the doc level, doesn’t take you far... Good or bad? What’s behind the posts?

15. Counting -- clicks, not even keywords -- leaves you wondering Why? and So What?

16. “Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying positive and negative opinions, emotions, and evaluations.” -- Wilson, Wiebe & Hoffman, 2005, “Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis” “Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the computational study of opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in text… An opinion on a feature f is a positive or negative view, attitude, emotion or appraisal on f from an opinion holder.” -- Bing Liu, 2010, “Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity,” in Handbook of Natural Language Processing

18. There are many complications. Simplified: Sentiment may be of interest at multiple levels. Corpus / data space, i.e., across multiple sources. Document. Statement / sentence. Entity / topic / concept. Human language is noisy and chaotic! Jargon, slang, irony, ambiguity, anaphora, polysemy, synonymy, etc. Context is key. Discourse analysis comes into play. Must distinguish the sentiment holder from the object: Greenspan said the recession will…

19. Sentiment sources (broadly): News Social media Enterprise feedback (To me, it’s all social.) Consumption models: General search engine Siloed/vertical search interfaces, a.k.a. monitoring tools Application embedded Widgets/gadgets

21. Rated negative?

22. Manual focus ???

23. An accuracy aside: [WWH 2005] describes an inter-annotator agreement test. 10 documents w/ 447 subjective expressions.The two annotators agree on 82% of cases. Excluding of uncertain subjective expressions (18%) boosts agreement to 90%. (Wilson, Wiebe & Hoffman, 2005, “Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis”)

25. Next slides have a few more examples. SAS Social Media Analytics. Clarabridge Social Media Analysis. Crimson Hexagon VoxTrot. Clarabridgesentiment analysis. A Jodangeembeddable “gadget.” Newssift.com, a now defunct media portal from the Financial Times Group.

32. Beyond polarity: “We present a system that adds an emotional dimension to an activity that Internet users engage in frequently, search..” -- Sood& Vasserman & Hoffman, 2009, “ESSE: Exploring Mood on the Web”

33. HappySadAngry Energetic Confused Aggravated Bouncy Crappy Angry Happy Crushed Bitchy Hyper Depressed Enraged Cheerful Distressed Infuriated Ecstatic Envious Irate Excited Gloomy Pissed off Jubilant Guilty Giddy Intimidated Giggly Jealous Lonely Rejected Sad Scared ----------------------- The three prominent mood groups that emerged from K-Means Clustering on the set of LiveJournalmood labels.

35. Questions? Comments?