Perspectives on Sentiment Analysis

One of the consequences of the widespread use of social media is the equally widespread availability of all sorts of once intimate and private stuff: textual, visual, and affective. From this, a new form of labor arises: the mining of social media data. One type of social media data mining is sentiment analysis, the application of a range of technologies to determine sentiments expressed within social media about particular topics. This article maps out a range of emerging perspectives on sentiment analysis and argues that these sometimes-competing views need to be brought together, so that analyses of new socio-technical phenomena like sentiment analysis can be rich and rounded. Notes 1In response to negative blog posts about poor quality customer service and fearful of losing market share, Dell set up Direct2Dell to encourage customers to share their frustrations directly with the company. Initially, they received many negative comments, but their responses to these comments were seen to re-build trust with customers over time. In another incident, painkiller Motrin released an advertisement targeting mothers carrying their babies in carriers, which was not well received because of its flippant tone. Negative commentary spread rapidly on Twitter, after which Motrin removed the ad and apologized. The original advert can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO6SlTUBA38 and a response here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhR-y1N6R8Q 2In the US, it's even higher, at 4.4. 3I thank Cristina Miguel for assistance with some of these interviews.