Social Media and the Power of Sentiment Analysis

Humans are fairly sophisticated when it comes to understanding the complex meanings beneath the spoken or written word. For example, we can tell that a statement like, "My car had a flat. Brilliant!" is sarcastic, not actually brilliant. And with the help of machine learning, computers are beginning to get better at reading between the lines of our tweets, Facebook updates, and email messages, resulting in a new kind of analytics: sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, seeks to determine the attitude of an individual or group regarding a particular topic or overall context – be it a judgment, evaluation, or emotional reaction – from text, video, or audio data.