Techniques and Applications for Sentiment Analysis——1. Introduction 引言

“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 such as SAS and SPSS include dedicated sentiment analysis modules. There is a huge explosion today of ‘sentiments’ 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.”
情感分析(或意见挖掘)被定义为寻找作者对特定实体的意见的任务。人们的决策过程受到思想领袖和普通人形成的意见的影响。当一个人想在网上购买一件产品时，他通常会先搜索其他人写的关于各种产品的评论和意见。情感分析是计算机科学中最热门的研究领域之一。关于这个主题已经写了7000多篇文章。数以百计的初创公司正在开发情感分析解决方案，主要的统计软件包，如SAS和SPSS包括专门的情感分析模块。今天，从Twitter、Facebook、留言板、博客和用户论坛等社交媒体上可以看到大量的“情绪”。这些文字片段是公司和个人的金矿，他们想要监控他们的声誉，并得到关于他们的产品和行动的及时反馈。情感分析为这些组织提供了实时监控不同社交媒体网站并采取相应行动的能力。营销经理、公关公司、竞选经理、政客，甚至股票投资者和网上购物者都是情绪分析技术的直接受益者。

key insights

• “Sentiment analysis offers organizations the ability to monitor various social media sites in real time and act accordingly.”
  情感分析为组织提供了实时监控各种社交媒体网站并采取相应行动的能力。
• “Aspect-level sentiment analysis is the most fine-grained analysis of review articles and social media snippets with respect to specific objects and their aspects.”
  方面层面的情感分析是对评论文章和社交媒体片段就特定对象及其方面进行的最细粒度的分析。
• “Utilization of sentiment analysis techniques in stock picking can lead to superior returns.”
  在选股中运用情绪分析技术可以带来较高的回报。

“The input to the system is a corpus of documents in any format (PDF, HTML, XML, Word, among others). The documents in this corpus are converted to text and are pre-processed using a variety of linguistic tools such as stemming, tokenization, part of speech tagging, entity extraction, and relation extraction. The system may also utilize a set of lexicons and linguistic resources. The main component of the system is the document analysis module, which utilizes the linguistic resources to annotate the pre-processed documents with sentiment annotations. The annotations may be attached to whole documents
(for document-based sentiment), to individual sentences (for sentence-based sentiment) or to specific aspects of entities (for aspect-based sentiment). These annotations are the output of the system and they may be presented to the user using a variety of visualization tools.”
系统的输入是任何格式(PDF、HTML、XML、Word等)的文档语料库。该语料库中的文档被转换为文本，并使用多种语言工具进行预处理，如词干提取、标记化、词性标注、实体提取和关系提取。该系统也可以利用一套词汇和语言资源。该系统的主要组成部分是文档分析模块，该模块利用语言资源对预处理后的文档进行情感标注。这种情感标注可以附加到整个文档(对于基于文档的情感)、单个句子(对于基于句子的情感)或实体的特定方面(对于基于方面的情感)。这些情感标注是系统的输出，它们可以使用各种可视化工具呈现给用户。