Sentiment Analysis: What is it and Why Does it Matter?

Sentiment Analysis, also known as Opinion Mining, refers to the techniques and processes that help organisations retrieve information about how their customer-base is reacting to a particular product or service.

In essence, Sentiment Analysis is the analysis of the feelings (i.e. emotions, attitudes, opinions, thoughts, etc.) behind the words by making use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. If you’re not aware of what NLP tools do – it’s pretty much all in the name. Natural Language Processing essentially aims to understand and create a natural language by using essential tools and techniques.

Sentiment Analysis also uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning  to help organisations look far beyond just the number of likes/shares/comments they get on an ad campaign, blog post, released product, or anything of that nature. In this article, we’ll be talking about Sentiment Analysis in great depth. From talking about the methods and tools of Sentiment Analysis to discussing why is it so extensively used – we’ve got it all covered!

#artificial intelligence #big data #data #data sciences #machine learning #sentiment analysis

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Sentiment Analysis in Python using Machine Learning

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is a simple task of understanding the emotions of the writer of a particular text. What was the intent of the writer when writing a certain thing?

We use various natural language processing (NLP) and text analysis tools to figure out what could be subjective information. We need to identify, extract and quantify such details from the text for easier classification and working with the data.

But why do we need sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis serves as a fundamental aspect of dealing with customers on online portals and websites for the companies. They do this all the time to classify a comment as a query, complaint, suggestion, opinion, or just love for a product. This way they can easily sort through the comments or questions and prioritize what they need to handle first and even order them in a way that looks better. Companies sometimes even try to delete content that has a negative sentiment attached to it.

It is an easy way to understand and analyze public reception and perception of different ideas and concepts, or a newly launched product, maybe an event or a government policy.

Emotion understanding and sentiment analysis play a huge role in collaborative filtering based recommendation systems. Grouping together people who have similar reactions to a certain product and showing them related products. Like recommending movies to people by grouping them with others that have similar perceptions for a certain show or movie.

Lastly, they are also used for spam filtering and removing unwanted content.

How does sentiment analysis work?

NLP or natural language processing is the basic concept on which sentiment analysis is built upon. Natural language processing is a superclass of sentiment analysis that deals with understanding all kinds of things from a piece of text.

NLP is the branch of AI dealing with texts, giving machines the ability to understand and derive from the text. For tasks such as virtual assistant, query solving, creating and maintaining human-like conversations, summarizing texts, spam detection, sentiment analysis, etc. it includes everything from counting the number of words to a machine writing a story, indistinguishable from human texts.

Sentiment analysis can be classified into various categories based on various criteria. Depending upon the scope it can be classified into document-level sentiment analysis, sentence level sentiment analysis, and sub sentence level or phrase level sentiment analysis.

Also, a very common classification is based on what needs to be done with the data or the reason for sentiment analysis. Examples of which are

• Simple classification of text into positive, negative or neutral. It may also advance into fine grained answers like very positive or moderately positive.
• Aspect-based sentiment analysis- where we figure out the sentiment along with a specific aspect it is related to. Like identifying sentiments regarding various aspects or parts of a car in user reviews, identifying what feature or aspect was appreciated or disliked.
• The sentiment along with an action associated with it. Like mails written to customer support. Understanding if it is a query or complaint or suggestion etc

Based on what needs to be done and what kind of data we need to work with there are two major methods of tackling this problem.

• Matching rules based sentiment analysis: There is a predefined list of words for each type of sentiment needed and then the text or document is matched with the lists. The algorithm then determines which type of words or which sentiment is more prevalent in it.
• This type of rule based sentiment analysis is easy to implement, but lacks flexibility and does not account for context.
• Automatic sentiment analysis: They are mostly based on supervised machine learning algorithms and are actually very useful in understanding complicated texts. Algorithms in this category include support vector machine, linear regression, rnn, and its types. This is what we are gonna explore and learn more about.

In this machine learning project, we will use recurrent neural network for sentiment analysis in python.

#machine learning tutorials #machine learning project #machine learning sentiment analysis #python sentiment analysis #sentiment analysis

Sentiment Analysis of a book through Unsupervised Learning

Getting Started

In this tutorial, I will show you how to apply sentiment analysis to the text contained into a book through an Unsupervised Learning (UL) technique, based on the AFINN lexicon. This tutorial exploits the afinn Python package, which is available only for English and Danish. If your text is written into a different language, you could translate it before in English and use the afinn package.

This notebook applies sentiment analysis the Saint Augustine Confessions, which can be downloaded from the Gutemberg Project Page. The masterpiece is split in 13 books (or chapters). We have stored each book into a different file, named number.text (e.g. 1.txt and 2.txt). Each line of every file contains just one sentence.

You can download the code from my Github repository: https://github.com/alod83/papers/tree/master/aiucd2021

First of all import the Afinn class from the afinn package.

from afinn import Afinn

Then create a new Afinn object, by specifying the used language.

afinn = Afinn(language=’en’)

Calculate the Sentiment

Use the score give by Afinn to calculate the sentiment

The afinn object contains a method, called score(), which receives a sentence as input and returns a score as output. The score may be either positive, negative or neutral. We calculate the score of a book, simply by summing all the scores of all the sentence of that book. We define three variables> pos, neg and neutral, which store respectively the sum of all the positive, negative and neutral scores of all the sentences of a book.

Firstly, we define three indexes, which will be used after.

pos_index = []
neg_index = []
neutral_index = []

We open the file corresponding to each book through the open() function, we read all the lines through the function file.readlines() and for each line, we calculate the score.

Then, we can define three indexes to calculate the sentiment of a book: the positive sentiment index (pi), the negative sentiment index (ni) and the neutral sentiment index (nui). The pi of a book corresponds to the number of positive sentences in a book divided per the total number of sentences of the book. Similarly, we can calculate the ni and nui of a book.

for book in range(1,14):
    file = open('sources/' + str(book) + '.txt')
    lines = file.readlines()
    pos = 0
    neg = 0
    neutral = 0

    for line in lines:
        score = int(afinn.score(line))

        if score > 0:
            pos += 1
        elif score < 0:
            neg += 1
        else:
            neutral += 1

    n = len(lines)
    pos_index.append(pos / n)
    neg_index.append(neg / n)
    neutral_index.append(neutral / n)

#unsupervised-learning #sentiment-analysis #book-analysis #text-analysis #data-science

A Complete Guide To Sentiment Analysis And Its Applications

Introduction

Sentiment analysis is a technique through which you can analyze a piece of text to determine the sentiment behind it. It combines machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to achieve this. Using basic Sentiment analysis, a program can understand if the sentiment behind a piece of text is positive, negative, or neutral.

It is a powerful technique in Artificial intelligence that has important business applications. For example, you can use Sentiment analysis to analyze customer feedback. You can collect customer feedback through various mediums twitter, Facebook, etc. and run sentiment analysis algorithms on them to understand your customer ‘s attitude towards your product.

How Sentiment Analysis Works

The simplest implementation of sentiment analysis is using a scored word list. For example, AFINN is a list of words scored with numbers between minus five and plus five. You can split a piece of text into individual words and compare them with the word list to come up with the final sentiment score.

eg. I love cats, but I am allergic to them.

In the AFINN word list, you can find two words, “love” and “cats” with their respective scores of +2 and -3. You can ignore the rest of the words (again, this is very basic sentiment analysis). Combining these two, you get a total score of +1. So you can classify this sentence as mildly positive.

There are complex implementations of Sentiment analysis used in the industry today. Those algorithms can provide you with accurate scores for long pieces of text. Besides that, we have reinforcement learning models that keep getting better over time.

For complex models, you can use a combination of NLP and machine learning algorithms. There are three major types of algorithms used in sentiment analysis. Let’s take a look at them.

Automated Systems

Automatic approaches to sentiment analysis rely on machine learning models like clustering. Long pieces of text are fed into the classifier, and it returns the results as negative, neutral, or positive. Automatic systems are composed of two basic processes:

Rule-based Systems

Unlike automated models, rule-based approaches are dependent on custom rules to classify data. Popular techniques include tokenization, parsing, stemming, and a few others. You can consider the example we look at earlier as a rule-based approach.

A good thing about rule-based systems is the ability to customize. These algorithms can be tailor-made based on context by developing smarter rules. However, you will have to regularly maintain these types of rule-based models to ensure consistent and improved results.

Hybrid Systems

Hybrid techniques are the most modern, efficient, and widely-used approach for sentiment analysis. Well-designed hybrid systems can provide the benefits of both automatic and rule-based systems.

Hybrid models enjoy the power of machine learning along with the flexibility of customization. An example of a hybrid model would be a self-updating wordlist based on Word2Vec. You can track these wordlists and update them based on your business needs.

#data-science #artificial-intelligence #sentiment-analysis #data-analysis #data analysis

Grouping Feedback: Pivot Tables and Sentiment Analysis using NLP

Background

Applying for product management internships is usually the same series of events. Link a resume, maybe a few fill in the blanks on a survey form, and submit. However, one of the most interesting PM applications I came across was IGN’s. Applicants were only given a set of questions to answer; no resume accepted. The process was great practice; this question was as follows…

“IGN has been collecting feedback from our wiki users to figure out ways we could improve their experience… Create a pivot table grouping this feedback into categories that will help us improve user experience on wiki pages, and what you would suggest for next steps.”

_Disclaimer: I assume this isn’t a breach of privacy, these questions are available on their application’s website _IGN Code Foo 2020

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Overview

I decided to answer this question about grouping feedback from two angles (the lockdown gave me _a lot _of time to think); the straightforward “logical” approach using Excel and pivot tables, and the moonshot “creative” approach using machine learning & TensorFlow attempting to detect sentiment.

Dataset

Feedback data from IGN’s Game Wiki pages

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Logical Approach

Using Excel and creating a pivot table based on categories I felt were useful within the dataset.

Methodology

• I started by visiting the URLs for each of the feedback to uncover some useful features and categories for grouping. It was only 24 sites, and from those visits, I built categories that lead to insightful filters for the data.

Categorizing the feedback based on the best judgment

• I’m not sure that was the most efficient way to scan webpages for content. I could have used an auto data scrape program, but live and learn.
• I created a pivot table to better visualize the subsections found within the feedback. I used categories such as missing or wrong information, and I filtered data based on what I thought was most important, like country code top-level domain (ccTLD).

#sentiment-analysis #data analysis #data analysis

Streamline Your Data Analysis With Automated Business Analysis

Have you ever visited a restaurant or movie theatre, only to be asked to participate in a survey? What about providing your email address in exchange for coupons? Do you ever wonder why you get ads for something you just searched for online? It all comes down to data collection and analysis. Indeed, everywhere you look today, there’s some form of data to be collected and analyzed. As you navigate running your business, you’ll need to create a data analytics plan for yourself. Data helps you solve problems , find new customers, and re-assess your marketing strategies. Automated business analysis tools provide key insights into your data. Below are a few of the many valuable benefits of using such a system for your organization’s data analysis needs.

Workflow integration and AI capability

Pinpoint unexpected data changes

Understand customer behavior

Enhance marketing and ROI

…

#big data #latest news #data analysis #streamline your data analysis #automated business analysis #streamline your data analysis with automated business analysis