Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks through Topic modeling

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the sentiments derived from the conversations that occur in social networks. Our goal is to identify the sentiments of the users in the social network through their conversations. We conduct a study to determine whether users of social networks (twitter in particular) tend to gather together according to the likeness of their sentiments. In our proposed framework, (1) we use ANEW, a lexical dictionary to identify affective emotional feelings associated to a message according to the Russell's model of affection; (2) we design a topic modeling mechanism called Sent_LDA, based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) generative model, which allows us to find the topic distribution in a general conversation and we associate topics with emotions; (3) we detect communities in the network according to the density and frequency of the messages among the users; and (4) we compare the sentiments of the communities by using the Russell's model of affect versus polarity and we measure the extent to which topic distribution strengthen likeness in the sentiments of the users of a community. This works contributes with a topic modeling methodology to analyze the sentiments in conversations that take place in social networks.

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