Conducting Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

This Element provides a basic introduction to sentiment analysis, aimed at helping students and professionals in corpus linguistics to understand what sentiment analysis is, how it is conducted, and where it can be applied. It begins with a definition of sentiment analysis and a discussion of the domains where sentiment analysis is conducted and used the most. Then, it introduces two main methods that are commonly used in sentiment analysis known as “supervised machine-learning” and “unsupervised learning (or lexicon-based)” methods, followed by a step-by-step explanation about how to perform sentiment analysis with R. The Element then provides two detailed examples or cases of sentiment and emotion analysis, with one using an unsupervised method and the other using a supervised learning method.