Understanding sentiment analysis

You are running for public office, and to increase the chances of being elected, you must perform a substantial effort to persuade the voters. This undertaking becomes even more challenging for non-sympathizers and ambivalent citizens. Hence, a possible strategy is to focus on less favorable regions to your candidacy, which can be identified from the sentiment expressed in social media posts in this area. Similarly, suppose you are the CEO of a company that recently deployed a new product. This time, you are interested in knowing how your customers perceive it and in understanding their opinions. In both scenarios, you should also be concerned about the competition and the sentiment against your opponents’ political campaigns or competitor products. All these issues can be addressed by performing sentiment analysis: assigning a sentiment label to a piece of text. This task is the current chapter’s theme.

Recall the discussion in the...