Tutorial: Practical Sentiment Analysis
May 7, 2013, 2 - 5:30 pm, New York
The Sentiment Analysis Symposium will be preceded Tuesday afternoon, May 7, 2013 by a half-day tutorial, Practical Sentiment Analysis, 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm, designed and taught by Prof. Ronen Feldman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with an additional presentation by symposium chair, industry analyst Seth Grimes. Read Prof. Feldman on Techniques and Applications for Sentiment Analysis in the Communications of the ACM, April 2013.
Previous tutorials have been taught by staff from eBay Research Labs (April 2011), Christopher Potts of Stanford University (November 2011), Bing Liu of the University of Illinois at Chicago (May 2012), and Diana Maynard, research fellow at the Univ. of Sheffield, UK (November, 2012).
The tutorial is designed for advanced users, developers, consultants, and others who seek to understand the technology behind the tools they're using (or hope to build). You may register for the tutorial or the symposium or both.
Tutorial Description
Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is defined as the task of finding the opinions of authors about specific entities. The decision making process of people is affected by the opinions formed by thought leaders and ordinary people. When a person wants to buy a product online he or she will typically start by searching for reviews and opinions written by other people on the various offerings. Sentiment analysis is one of the hottest research areas in computer science. Over 7,000 articles have been written on the topic. Hundreds of startups are developing sentiment analysis solutions and major statistical packages include dedicated sentiment analysis modules. There is a huge explosion today of texts available from social media including Twitter, Facebook, message boards, blogs, and user forums. These snippets of text are a gold mine for companies and individuals that want to monitor their reputation and get timely feedback about their products and actions. Sentiment analysis offers these organizations the ability to monitor the different social media sites in real time and act accordingly. Marketing managers, PR firms, campaign managers, politicians and even equity investors and online shoppers are the direct beneficiaries of sentiment analysis technology.
Tutorial Outline
- Introduction to Sentiment Analysis
- what is sentiment analysis?
- who needs it and why is it useful?
- what kinds of fields is it used in?
- how successful is sentiment analysis in prediction?
- Building Sentiment Analysis Systems
- sentiment analysis at the document, sentence, and aspect level
- sentiment lexicon acquisition
- opinion holder identification
- trustworthy opinions, spam opinions, and fake reviews
- detecting and dealing with complications: sarcasm/irony, negation, and slang and incorrect English
- strengths and weaknesses of current systems: available tools and how to compare and evaluate the different types (commercial, research, public)
- Applications
- Sentiment in Financial News
- a detailed description of a financial sentiment analysis system
- step by step description of a real application for analyzing Stock Twits
- Brand Monitoring and Marketing
- analyzing user forums
- step by step description of a real application for analyzing social media (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) for general opinions about products, brands, people etc.
- discussion of, and solutions to, the challenges imposed by processing social media (use of incorrect language, short or incomplete sentences, lack of contextual information, use of multiple languages, etc., use of slang, etc.)
- Sentiment in Financial News
- Summary and Q+A
Marketplace Extra (to be presented by Seth Grimes)
- A survey of the solutions marketplace.
- How to evaluate vendor claims and find the right provider.
Registration and Location
You may register for the tutorial or the symposium or both. Visit the registration page.
The tutorial will take place in the Park Avenue Room, 6th floor of the Lighthouse International conference center, 111 East 59th Street, New York, NY.
