Hidden Markov Models for Sentiment Analysis in Social Media

Abstract

User-generated content in social media contain very meaningful information about public sentiment and stance and require automated methods to analyze them extract knowledge from them. The recognition of sentiments, emotions and attitudes in textual data is necessary for understanding public stance and is highly desired for various services and procedures. In this work, we examine the performance of Hidden Markov Models (HMM) in the recognition of sentiments and opinions in text. Hidden Markov Models constitute a quite suitable approach given the special characteristics of the textual data. In particular, they can utilize the sequential nature of textual data, a piece of information that traditional machine learning approaches fail to fully take into account. We performed several experiments in order to assess the performance of different HMM-based methods under various training parameters and architectures. The evaluation results indicate that Hidden Markov Models achieve superior performance compared to traditional machine learning algorithms and highlight that they are scalable and accurate in analyzing user generated content and in specifying opinions and attitudes.