Network-Based Visualization of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter

Abstract

Visualizing the result of users' opinion mining on twitter using social network graph can play a crucial role in decision-making. Available data visualizing tools, such as NodeXL, use a specific file format as an input to construct and visualize the social network graph. One of the main components of the input file is the sentimental score of the users' opinion. This motivates us to develop a free and open source system that can take the opinion of users in raw text format and produce easy-to-interpret visualization of opinion mining and sentiment analysis result on a social network. We use a public machine learning library called LingPipe Library to classify the sentiments of users' opinion into positive, negative and neutral classes. Our proposed system can be used to analyze and visualize users' opinion on the network level to determine sub-social structures (sub-groups). Moreover, the proposed system can also identify influential people in the social network by using node level metrics such as betweenness centrality. In addition to the network level and node level analysis, our proposed method also provides an efficient filtering mechanism by either time and date, or the sentiment score. We tested our proposed system using user opinions about different Samsung products and related issues that are collected from five official twitter accounts of Samsung Company. The test results show that our proposed system will be helpful to analyze and visualize the opinion of users at both network level and node level.