Evaluating Sentiment on Twitter

Twitter is a highly popular social network with over 300 million monthly active users. The platform has been developed around short posts (limited to a number of characters; currently, the limit is 280 characters). The posts themselves are called tweets. On average, 6000 tweets are tweeted every second, which equates to around 200 billion tweets per year. This constitutes a huge amount of data that contains an equal amount of information. As is obvious, it is not possible to analyze this volume of data by hand. Thus, automated solutions have been employed, both by Twitter and third parties. One of the hottest topics involves a tweet's sentiment, or how the user feels about the topic that they tweets. Sentiment analysis comes in many flavors. The most common approach is a positive or negative classification of each tweet. Other approaches involve...