VADER Sentiment Analysis without and with English Punctuation Marks

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is the foremost task in Natural Language Processing to understand the user’s attitude (positive, neutral, or negative) by capturing their thoughts, opinions, and feeling about a particular product. This helps companies to fulfill customer satisfaction and make better future decisions about the product. Various techniques have been used in the literature forsentiment analysis, such as polarity scores, classifications, and automated sentiment analysis. In this paper, Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis tool has been employed on a Twitter dataset (downloaded from https://www.kaggle.com). The study aims to measure the performance of VADER sentiment while concatenating fourteen English language punctuations marks, including Exclamation (!), Comma (,), Full Stop (.), Question Mark (?), Round Brackets (), Curly Brackets {}, Square Brackets [], Colon (:), Apostrophe (‘), Dash (-), Hyphen (--), Semi-Colon (;), Slash (/), Quotation Mark (“ ”) and to observe whether the polarity (positive, neutral and negative) of a sentence changes or remains the same. After the analysis, the study found that Exclamation (!) maximizes the average positive polarity and average negative polarity and lowers the average neutralpolarity. The Hyphen (--) and Comma (,) increase the average positive and neutral polarity and decrease the aver-age negative polarity. For Round Brackets (), Curly Brackets {}, Square Brackets [], Colon (:), Apostrophe (‘), Dash (-), Semi-Colon (;), Slash (/) and Full Stop (.) the average positive and average neutral polarity decreases and average negative polarity increases.