User-level sentiment analysis incorporating social networks

  • Authors:
  • Chenhao Tan;Lillian Lee;Jie Tang;Long Jiang;Ming Zhou;Ping Li

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Microsoft Corporation, Beijing, China;Microsoft Corporation, Beijing, China;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We show that information about social relationships can be used to improve user-level sentiment analysis. The main motivation behind our approach is that users that are somehow "connected" may be more likely to hold similar opinions; therefore, relationship information can complement what we can extract about a user's viewpoints from their utterances. Employing Twitter as a source for our experimental data, and working within a semi-supervised framework, we propose models that are induced either from the Twitter follower/followee network or from the network in Twitter formed by users referring to each other using "@" mentions. Our transductive learning results reveal that incorporating social-network information can indeed lead to statistically significant sentiment classification improvements over the performance of an approach based on Support Vector Machines having access only to textual features.