Do Happy Meals really make us happy? Do salads make us blue? Is cake our comfort? FoodMood is an interactive data visualisation project that gives citizens a rare opportunity to engage and reflect, acknowledge, and understand the connection between emotion, obesity and food. The project explores the opportunities presented by the data-sharing world of today’s cities using global English-language tweets about food coupled with sentiment analysis. It aims to gain a better understanding of global food consumption patterns and its impact on the daily emotional well-being of people against the backdrop of country data such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and obesity levels. A key finding is that tweets can be used to find a relationship between certain foods, food sentiment and obesity levels in countries. Overall FoodMood shows a majority positive sentiment towards food. Other findings, although constantly evolving, indicate trends such as: globally meat enjoys a high sentiment rating and is often tweeted about; fast-food companies dominate the food consumption landscapes of most countries’ tweets although not all of them enjoy equal sentiment ratings across countries. Ultimately, FoodMood reveals a hidden layer of meaningful digital, social, and cultural data that provide a basis for further analysis.

We analyze data about the micro-blogging site Twitter using sentiment extraction techniques. From an information perspective, Twitter users are involved mostly in two processes: information creation and subsequent distribution (tweeting), and pure information distribution (retweeting), with pronounced preference to the first. However a rather substantial fraction of tweets are retweeted. Here, we address the role of the sentiment expressed in tweets for their potential aftermath. We find that although the overall sentiment (polarity) does not influence the probability of a tweet to be retweeted, a new measure called "emotional divergence" does have an impact. In general, tweets with high emotional diversity have a better chance of being retweeted, hence influencing the distribution of information.

We present a computational framework for understanding the social aspects of emotions in Twitter conversations. Using unannotated data and semisupervised machine learning, we look at emotional transitions, emotional influences among the conversation partners, and patterns in the overall emotional exchanges. We find that conversational partners usually express the same emotion, which we name Emotion accommodation, but when they do not, one of the conversational partners tends to respond with a positive emotion. We also show that tweets containing sympathy, apology, and complaint are significant emotion influencers. We verify the emotion classification part of our framework by a human-annotated corpus.

There has been significant recent interest in using the aggregate sentiment from social media sites to understand and predict real-world phenomena. However, the data from social media sites also offers a unique and — so far — unexplored opportunity to study the impact of external factors on aggregate sentiment, at the scale of a society. Using a Twitter-specific sentiment extraction methodology, we the explore patterns of sentiment present in a corpus of over 1.5 billion tweets. We focus primarily on the effect of the weather and time on aggregate sentiment, evaluating how clearly the well-known individual patterns translate into population-wide patterns. Using machine learning techniques on the Twitter corpus correlated with the weather at the time and location of the tweets, we find that aggregate sentiment follows distinct climate, temporal, and seasonal patterns.

Sentiment classification has been a well-investigated research area in the computational linguistics community. However, most of the research is primarily focused on detecting simply the polarity in text, often needing extensive manual labeling of ground truth. Additionally, little attention has been directed towards a finer analysis of human moods and affective states. Motivated by research in psychology, we propose and develop a classifier of several human affective states in social media. Starting with about 200 moods, we utilize mechanical turk studies to derive naturalistic signals from posts shared on Twitter about a variety of affects of individuals. This dataset is then deployed in an affect classification task with promising results. Our findings indicate that different types of affect involve different emotional content and usage styles; hence the performance of the classifier on various affects can differ considerably.

The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for information retrieval and web data mining research. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user's query at a point in time, automated methods are required to sift through this information. Sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling microblog content. We build and evaluate a sentiment-based filtering system using real-time user studies. We find a significant role played by sentiment in the search scenarios, observing detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users' prior topic sentiment.

In this article, we study the polarity detection problem using linear supervised classifiers. We show the interest of penalizing the document frequencies in the regularization process to increase the accuracy. We propose a systematic comparison of different loss and regularization functions on this particular task using the Amazon dataset. Then, we evaluate our models according to three criteria: accuracy, sparsity and subjectivity. The subjectivity is measured by projecting our dictionary and optimized weight vector on the SentiWordNet lexicon. This original approach highlights a bias in the selection of the relevant terms during the regularization procedure: frequent terms are overweighted compared to their intrinsic subjectivities.We show that this bias appears whatever the chosen loss or regularization and on all datasets: it is closely link to the gradient descent technique. Penalizing the document frequency during the learning step enables us to improve significantly our performances. A lot of sentimental markers appear rarely and thus, are unappreciated by statistical learning algorithms. Explicitly boosting their influences leads to increasing the accuracy in the sentiment classification task.

Most sentiment analysis studies address classification of a single source of data such as reviews or blog posts. However, the multitude of social media sources available for text analysis lends itself naturally to domain adaptation. In this study, we create a dataset spanning three social media sources -- blogs, reviews, and Twitter -- and a set of 37 common topics. We first examine sentiments expressed in these three sources while controlling for the change in topic. Then using this multi-dimensional data we show that when classifying documents in one source (a target source), models trained on other sources of data can be as good as or even better than those trained on the target data. That is, we show that models trained on some social media sources are generalizable to others. All source adaptation models we implement show reviews and Twitter to be the best sources of training data. It is especially useful to know that models trained on Twitter data are generalizable, since, unlike reviews, Twitter is more topically diverse.

Many studies have shown that social data such as tweets are a rich source of information about the real-world including, for example, insights into health trends. A key limitation when analyzing Twitter data, however, is that it depends on people self-reporting their own behaviors and observations. In this paper, we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of some of the factors that influence self-reporting bias. In our study, we compare a year of tweets about weather events to ground-truth knowledge about actual weather occurrences. For each weather event we calculate how extreme, how expected, and how big a change the event represents. We calculate the extent to which these factors can explain the daily variations in tweet rates about weather events. We find that we can build global models that take into account basic weather information, together with extremeness, expectation and change calculations to account for over 40% of the variability in tweet rates. We build location-specific (i.e., a model per each metropolitan area) models that account for an average of 70% of the variability in tweet rates.

Emotional states of individuals, also known as moods, are central to the expression of thoughts, ideas and opinions, and in turn impact attitudes and behavior. As social media tools are increasingly used by individuals to broadcast their day-to-day happenings, or to report on an external event of interest, understanding the rich ‘landscape’ of moods will help us better interpret and make sense of the behavior of millions of individuals. Motivated by literature in psychology, we study a popular representation of human mood landscape, known as the ‘circumplex model’ that characterizes affective experience through two dimensions: valence and activation. We identify more than 200 moods frequent on Twitter, through mechanical turk studies and psychology literature sources, and report on four aspects of mood expression: the relationship between (1) moods and usage levels, including linguistic diversity of shared content (2) moods and the social ties individuals form, (3) moods and amount of network activity of individuals, and (4) moods and participatory patterns of individuals such as link sharing and conversational engagement. Our results provide at-scale naturalistic assessments and extensions of existing conceptualizations of human mood in social media contexts.