Sentiment Classification-How to Quantify Public Emotions Using Twitter

Abstract

This article describes how with the tremendous popularity in the usage of social media has led to the explosive growth in unstructured data available on various social networking sites. Sentiment analysis of textual data collected from such platforms has become an important research area. In this article, the sentiment classification approach which employs an emotion detection technique is presented. To identify the emotions this paper uses the NRC lexicon based approach for identifying polarity of emotions. A score is computed to quantify emotions obtained from NRC lexicon approach. The method proposed has been tested on twitter datasets of government policies and reforms, more about current NDA government initiatives in India. The polarity components apply and classify the tweets into eight predefined emotions. This article performs both quantitative and sentiment analysis processes with the objective of analyzing the opinion conveyed to each social content, assign a category (+ve, -ve & neutral) or numbered sentiment score. The assigned scores have been classified using six different machine classification algorithms. Good classification results are achieved with the data.