Sentiment Analysis: Overview, Applications and Benefits

When experimenting with machine learning and big data, you may identify data sets that contain streams of text that contain customer reviews, or social media posts where customers (or potential customers) are talking about a product, brand or service that you offer. Mining such data to determine how people feel about your product, brand, or service, is called Sentiment Analysis. People have always had an interest in what people think, or what their opinion is. Since the inception of the internet, increasing numbers of people are using websites and services to express their opinion. With social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it is becoming feasible to automate and gauge what public opinion is on a given topic, news story, product, or brand.