Sentimental Analysis with Examples – ID : 2018HW70128 

Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is a natural language processing
(NLP) technique used to determine whether data is positive, negative or
neutral. Sentiment analysis is often performed on textual data to help
businesses monitor brand and product sentiment in customer feedback,
and understand customer needs. 
Sentiment analysis is the process of detecting positive or negative
sentiment in text. It’s often used by businesses to detect sentiment in
social data, gauge brand reputation, and understand customers. 
Types of Sentiment Analysis 
Sentiment analysis focuses on the polarity of a text (positive, negative,
neutral) but it also goes beyond polarity to detect specific feelings and
emotions (angry, happy, sad, etc), urgency (urgent, not urgent) and
even intentions (interested v. not interested). 
Depending on how you want to interpret customer feedback and queries,
you can define and tailor your categories to meet your sentiment analysis
needs. In the meantime, here are some of the most popular types of
sentiment analysis: 
Graded Sentiment Analysis 
If polarity precision is important to your business, you might consider
expanding your polarity categories to include different levels of positive
and negative: 
 Very positive 
 Positive 
 Neutral 
 Negative 
 Very negative 
This is usually referred to as graded or fine-grained sentiment analysis,
and could be used to interpret 5-star ratings in a review, for example: 
 Very Positive = 5 stars 
 Very Negative = 1 star 
Emotion detection 
Emotion detection sentiment analysis allows you to go beyond polarity to
detect emotions, like happiness, frustration, anger, and sadness. 
Many emotion detection systems use lexicons (i.e. lists of words and the
emotions they convey) or complex machine learning algorithms. 
One of the downsides of using lexicons is that people express emotions in
different ways. Some words that typically express anger,
like bad or kill (e.g. your product is so bad or your customer support is killing me)
might also express happiness (e.g. this is bad ass or you are killing it). 
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis 
Usually, when analyzing sentiments of texts you’ll want to know which
particular aspects or features people are mentioning in a positive, neutral,
or negative way. 
That's where aspect-based sentiment analysis can help, for example in this
product review: "The battery life of this camera is too short", an aspect-based
classifier would be able to determine that the sentence expresses a
negative opinion about the battery life of the product in question. 
Multilingual sentiment analysis 
Multilingual sentiment analysis can be difficult. It involves a lot of
preprocessing and resources. Most of these resources are available online
(e.g. sentiment lexicons), while others need to be created (e.g. translated
corpora or noise detection algorithms), but you’ll need to know how to
code to use them. 
Alternatively, you could detect language in texts automatically with a
language classifier, then train a custom sentiment analysis model to
classify texts in the language of your choice. 
The overall benefits of sentiment analysis include: 
 Sorting Data at Scale 
Can you imagine manually sorting through thousands of tweets, customer
support conversations, or surveys? There’s just too much business data to
process manually. Sentiment analysis helps businesses process huge
amounts of unstructured data in an efficient and cost-effective way. 
 Real-Time Analysis 
Sentiment analysis can identify critical issues in real-time, for example is a
PR crisis on social media escalating? Is an angry customer about to churn?
Sentiment analysis models can help you immediately identify these kinds
of situations, so you can take action right away. 
 Consistent criteria 
It’s estimated that people only agree around 60-65% of the time when
determining the sentiment of a particular text. Tagging text by sentiment
is highly subjective, influenced by personal experiences, thoughts, and
beliefs. 
By using a centralized sentiment analysis system, companies can apply
the same criteria to all of their data, helping them improve accuracy and
gain better insights. 
The applications of sentiment analysis are endless. So, to help you
understand how sentiment analysis could benefit your business, let’s take
a look at some examples of texts that you could analyze using sentiment
analysis. 
Then, we’ll jump into a real-world example of how Chewy, a pet supplies
company, was able to gain a much more nuanced (and useful!)
understanding of their reviews through the application of sentiment
analysis. 
Sentiment analysis algorithms fall into one of three buckets: 
 Rule-based: these systems automatically perform sentiment
analysis based on a set of manually crafted rules. 
 Automatic: systems rely on machine learning techniques to learn
from data. 
 Hybrid: systems combine both rule-based and automatic
approaches. 
 
Rule-based Approaches 
Usually, a rule-based system uses a set of human-crafted rules to help
identify subjectivity, polarity, or the subject of an opinion. 
These rules may include various NLP techniques developed in
computational linguistics, such as: 
 Stemming, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and parsing. 
 Lexicons (i.e. lists of words and expressions). 
Here’s a basic example of how a rule-based system works: 

1. Defines two lists of polarized words (e.g. negative words such

as bad, worst, ugly, etc and positive words such
as good, best, beautiful, etc). 
 2. Counts the number of positive and negative words that appear in a
given text. 
3. If the number of positive word appearances is greater than the
number of negative word appearances, the system returns a
positive sentiment, and vice versa. If the numbers are even, the
system will return a neutral sentiment. 

Rule-based systems are very naive since they don't take into account
how words are combined in a sequence. Of course, more advanced
processing techniques can be used, and new rules added to support
new expressions and vocabulary. However, adding new rules may
affect previous results, and the whole system can get very complex.
Since rule-based systems often require fine-tuning and
maintenance, they’ll also need regular investments. 

Automatic Approaches 

Automatic methods, contrary to rule-based systems, don't rely on

manually crafted rules, but on machine learning techniques. A
sentiment analysis task is usually modeled as a classification
problem, whereby a classifier is fed a text and returns a category,
e.g. positive, negative, or neutral. 

In the training process (a), our model learns to associate a particular input
(i.e. a text) to the corresponding output (tag) based on the test samples
used for training. The feature extractor transfers the text input into a
feature vector. Pairs of feature vectors and tags (e.g. positive, negative,
or neutral) are fed into the machine learning algorithm to generate a
model. 
In the prediction process (b), the feature extractor is used to transform
unseen text inputs into feature vectors. These feature vectors are then fed
into the model, which generates predicted tags (again, positive, negative,
or neutral). 
Feature Extraction from Text 
The first step in a machine learning text classifier is to transform the
text extraction or text vectorization, and the classical approach has
been bag-of-words or bag-of-ngrams with their frequency. 
More recently, new feature extraction techniques have been applied
based on word embeddings (also known as word vectors). This kind of
representations makes it possible for words with similar meaning to have
a similar representation, which can improve the performance of
classifiers. 
 
Hybrid Approaches 
Hybrid systems combine the desirable elements of rule-based and
automatic techniques into one system. One huge benefit of these systems
is that results are often more accurate. 
Sentiment Analysis Challenges 
Sentiment analysis is one of the hardest tasks in natural language
processing because even humans struggle to analyze sentiments
accurately. 
Data scientists are getting better at creating more accurate sentiment
classifiers, but there’s still a long way to go. Let’s take a closer look at some
of the main challenges of machine-based sentiment analysis: 

1. Subjectivity & Tone 

2. Context & Polarity 
3. Irony & Sarcasm 
4. Comparisons 
5. Emojis 
6. Defining Neutral 
7. Human Annotator Accuracy 

Subjectivity and Tone 

There are two types of text: subjective and objective. Objective texts do
not contain explicit sentiments, whereas subjective texts do. Say, for
example, you intend to analyze the sentiment of the following two texts: 
The package is nice. 
The package is red. 
Most people would say that sentiment is positive for the first one and
neutral for the second one, right? All predicates (adjectives, verbs, and
some nouns) should not be treated the same with respect to how they
create sentiment. In the examples above, nice is more subjective than red. 
Context and Polarity 
All utterances are uttered at some point in time, in some place, by and to
some people, you get the point. All utterances are uttered in context.
Analyzing sentiment without context gets pretty difficult. However,
machines cannot learn about contexts if they are not mentioned explicitly.
One of the problems that arise from context is changes in polarity. Look at
the following responses to a survey: 
Everything about it. 
Absolutely nothing! 
Imagine the responses above come from answers to the question What did
you like about the event? The first response would be positive and the second
one would be negative, right? Now, imagine the responses come from
answers to the question What did you DISlike about the event? The negative in
the question will make sentiment analysis change altogether. 
A good deal of preprocessing or postprocessing will be needed if we are to
take into account at least part of the context in which texts were
produced. However, how to preprocess or postprocess data in order to
capture the bits of context that will help analyze sentiment is not
straightforward. 
Irony and Sarcasm 
When it comes to irony and sarcasm, people express their negative
sentiments using positive words, which can be difficult for machines to
detect without having a thorough understanding of the context of the
situation in which a feeling was expressed. 
For example, look at some possible answers to the question, Did you enjoy
your shopping experience with us? 
Yeah, sure. So smooth! 
Not one, but many! 
What sentiment would you assign to the responses above? The first
response with an exclamation mark could be negative, right? The problem
is there is no textual cue that will help a machine learn, or at least
question that sentiment since yeah and sure often belong to positive or
neutral texts. 
How about the second response? In this context, sentiment is positive, but
we’re sure you can come up with many different contexts in which the
same response can express negative sentiment. 
Comparisons 
How to treat comparisons in sentiment analysis is another challenge
worth tackling. Look at the texts below: 
This product is second to none. 
This is better than older tools. 
This is better than nothing. 
The first comparison doesn’t need any contextual clues to be classified
correctly. It’s clear that it’s positive. 
The second and third texts are a little more difficult to classify, though.
Would you classify them as neutral, positive, or even negative? Once again,
context can make a difference. For example, if the ‘older tools’ in the
second text were considered useless, then the second text is pretty similar
to the third text. 
Emojis 
There are two types of emojis according to Guibon et al.. Western
emojis (e.g. :D) are encoded in only one or two characters, whereas Eastern
emojis (e.g. ¯ \ (ツ) / ¯) are a longer combination of characters of a vertical
nature. Emojis play an important role in the sentiment of texts,
particularly in tweets. 
You’ll need to pay special attention to character-level, as well as word-
level, when performing sentiment analysis on tweets. A lot of
preprocessing might also be needed. For example, you might want to
preprocess social media content and transform both Western and Eastern
emojis into tokens and whitelist them (i.e. always take them as a feature
for classification purposes) in order to help improve sentiment analysis
performance. 
Here’s a quite comprehensive list of emojis and their unicode characters
that may come in handy when preprocessing. 
Defining Neutral 
Defining what we mean by neutral is another challenge to tackle in order to
perform accurate sentiment analysis. As in all classification problems,
defining your categories -and, in this case, the neutral tag- is one of the
most important parts of the problem. What you mean by neutral, positive,
or negative does matter when you train sentiment analysis models. Since
tagging data requires that tagging criteria be consistent, a good definition
of the problem is a must. 
Here are some ideas to help you identify and define neutral texts: 

1. Objective texts. So called objective texts do not contain explicit

sentiments, so you should include those texts into the neutral
category. 
2. Irrelevant information. If you haven’t preprocessed your data to filter
out irrelevant information, you can tag it neutral. However, be
careful! Only do this if you know how this could affect overall
performance. Sometimes, you will be adding noise to your classifier
and performance could get worse. 
3. Texts containing wishes. Some wishes like, I wish the product had more
integrations are generally neutral. However, those including
comparisons like, I wish the product were better are pretty difficult to
categorize 

Human Annotator Accuracy 

Sentiment analysis is a tremendously difficult task even for humans. On
average, inter-annotator agreement (a measure of how well two (or more)
human labelers can make the same annotation decision) is pretty low
when it comes to sentiment analysis. And since machines learn
from labeled data, sentiment analysis classifiers might not be as precise as
other types of classifiers. 
Still, sentiment analysis is worth the effort, even if your sentiment analysis
predictions are wrong from time to time. By using MonkeyLearn’s sentiment
analysis model, you can expect correct predictions about 70-80% of the time
you submit your texts for classification. 
If you are new to sentiment analysis, then you’ll quickly notice
improvements. For typical use cases, such as ticket routing, brand
monitoring, and VoC analysis, you’ll save a lot of time and money on
tedious manual tasks. 
Sentiment Analysis examples :- 
Reputation Management - Social Media Monitoring - Brand Sentiment Analysis 
Brand monitoring and reputation management is the most common use
of sentiment analysis across different markets. No wonder -
understanding how the consumers perceive your brand/product/service is
equally useful for tech companies, marketing agencies, fashion brands,
media organizations, and many others. 
In essence, the sentiment analysis application brings additional flexibility
and insight into the presentation of the brand and its products. It allows
companies to: 

 track the perception of the brand by the customers; 

 point out the specific details about the attitude; 
 Find patterns and trends; 
 keep a close eye on the presentation by the influencers. 

All this allows us to adjust to the state of things accordingly and give the
product a proper presentation. 
Overall, sentiment analysis can be used to: 

 Automate media monitoring process and the accompanying alert

system 
 Monitor mentions or reviews of the brand on different platforms
(blogs, social media, review sites, forums, etc.) 
 Categorize urgency of mentions according to the relevancy scoring
(i.e., which platform, type of user is vital to the brand) 

The whole operation consists of two stages: 

 At the initial stage, the company reacts to the incoming results and
adapts. 
  Over time, sentiment analysis can transform the course of action
from reacting to managing the perception. 

Use case: How KFC is doing it 

An excellent example of how to use sentiment analysis for brand building
and monitoring is KFC. For a while, KFC was stuck in the past, while the
competition was moving ahead and reinventing themselves with the
narratives of healthy food and feel-good experiences. 
So, instead of trying to establish themselves in the crowded niche, KFC
had chosen to use the ubiquitous power of the brand. KFC started riding
on the waves of memes and pop culture iconography (most recently by
using RoboCop to promote the newest product) to instill the brand’s value
proposition. 
his approach generates natural traction around the brand that is
augmented by the pop culture reference. As a result, users engage with
the brand and ultimately are led to engage with the product down the
line. You have to react and adapt almost instantly, which is where
sentiment analysis kicks in. 
The method combines sentiment analysis in social networks monitoring
and campaign management that involves: 

 Performance monitoring with aspect-based sentiment analysis to

point out the specific elements of the presentation 
 Topic mining to extract new ideas and variations. 

This creates a loop that perpetuates the campaign’s proceedings. 

Due to the nature of the marketing campaign, the users are actively
involved in commenting or reacting to the ad content. In turn, this
generates further ideas for the development of the campaign. 
The result: 

 KFC brand is constantly present in the media landscape and that

presence guarantees the steady growth of the reach and ultimately
the market share. 
Market Research, Competitor Analysis 
Apart from brand perception and customer opinion exploration, market
research is probably the most prominent field of sentiment analysis
application. 
It is important to note that sentiment analysis is not the primary tool for
market research. However, it can bring an additional perspective on the
market and give a couple of handy insights about how the state of things
is seen from the ground level i.e. consumers. 
In addition to that, you can use a similar approach to analyze the
competition and their marketing efforts. 
Here’s what you can do with sentiment analysis: 

 Gather information across different platforms 

o User-generated content (comments, reviews, etc) 
o News articles 
o Influencer content 
o Competitor’s content 
 Extract numerous insights on different criteria 
o General perception 
o Perception of the specific aspect 
 Provide results in real-time 
 Fill the gaps in business intelligence 

Sentiment analysis can elaborate on the needs and demands of the

consumers and help to adjust your value proposition so that it would hit
all the right marks. 
Example: How Apple is doing it 
The way Apple presents its products and establishes them on the market
is a fine example of sentiment analysis application for the benefit of
market research and competitor analysis. 
Think about how neatly the product’s strong points fit general pains and
disgruntlement of the various segments of the user. 
For example: 

 Bad design - you don’t even need to think when using our stuff. 
  Poor privacy - we keep personal data use at an absolute minimum. 
 Low battery life - we’ve got resource management tools. 

Such things can be pointed out by analyzing the competitors and their
movements on the market in general by specific aspects. For example: 

 Brand value proposition 

 Addressing various issues 
 Introducing new features 
 Announcing milestones and so on 

A combination of this information from several maps out the market

situation and allows calculating an additional perspective on how to
differentiate and strengthen its value proposition. 
The result: 

 Apple is a trillion-dollar company because they listen to the

customer. 

Product Analytics 
The use of sentiment analysis in product analytics stems from reputation
management. Conceptually, it is very similar to brand monitoring. But
instead of brand mentions, it goes for specific comments and remarks
regarding the product and its performance in specific areas (user
interface, feature performance, etc). 
This kind of insight is very important at the initial stages with MVP when
you need to try the product by fire (i.e. actual users) and make it as
polished as possible. 
At this stage, the most basic way to apply sentiment analysis is to gather
and categorize feedback for further improvements. 
Sentiment analysis algorithm can do the dirty work and show what kind of
feedback goes from which segment of the audience and at what it points. 
Usually, the whole thing is divided between the following types: 

 Brand keywords 
 Brand-adjacent keywords 
  Customer needs 
 Customer sentiment 
 Competitors analysis (based on similar criteria) 

As a result, this can be a significant factor in the product’s successful

establishment on the market. 
At the later stages, the use of sentiment analysis in product analytics
merges with brand monitoring and provides a multi-dimensional view of
the product and its brand: 

 How the brand/product is perceived by various target audience

segments? 
 Which elements of the product or its presentation are the points of
contention and in what light? 

Use case: How Google is doing it 

A good showcase of how sentiment analysis application contributes to
product improvement can be seen in Google’s output. Let’s take the
Chrome browser for example. 
Google Chrome’s development team is constantly monitoring user
feedback, whether it is direct or indirect (i.e. presented in the open
sources, most notably, blogs). 
But they are not looking at feedback as a message from the user but
rather as a sum of its parts: 

 the sentiment itself (positive or negative) 

 Mentions of the specific aspects of the product - whether it is
scalability, extensions, security, or UI. 
 Sentiments, wishes, and recommendations regarding the product in
general and its specific elements. 

The result: 

 These elements provide an additional perspective on the weak and

strong points of the product 
  This subsequently contributes to further research and development
of the product 

Voice of the Customer Analysis 

Accurate target audience segmentation and subsequent value proposition
formulation are amongst the key elements of effective business
operation. You need to know where are you aiming at with what. 
On the other side of the spectrum, you have to keep the hand on the
pulse of your customer in order to remain relevant and keep your product
in demand. 
In the very center of both activities is an understanding of the “Voice of
the customer”. 
However, one does not simply capture and study the voice of the
customer. It is scattered around the different platforms and presented in
a variety of conflicting forms. All this needs to be sorted out nice and
clear. 
Customer Sentiment Analysis algorithms are capable of capturing and
studying the voice of the client with much bigger accuracy. 
The process is twofold. 

 During Market Research - sentiment analysis can be used to explore

target audience segments in general. It can help to define and
further specify what particular segment wants and needs, expects
from such products, which similar products are preferred or in use
in the segment, and so on. 
 Regarding the product itself - sentiment analysis can be used to
analyze direct and indirect customer feedback from multiple
platforms. You can study the experiences customers had with your
product and determine what it means for the business. 

Example: How TripAdvisor is doing it 

A good example of VOC analysis done right is TripAdvisor. 
The company applies aspect-based sentiment analysis in order to make
the most out of the immense amount of data it generates. The aspect-
based approach allows to extracts the viable points regarding customer
feedback and the service itself. 
As the result, sentiment analysis gives an additional perspective on
various parts of the business operation, which allows us to understand
what the target audience needs, thinks, feels can be improved, and so on. 
Ultimately, this contributes to the further polish of the service and
strengthening of customer engagement by providing them with what they
need. 
Customer Support - feedback analysis 
Customer Support is one of the marquee elements of sentiment analysis
application in real life. 
There are several ways sentiment analysis can be implemented: 

 Insight into customer’s opinions regarding the product:  

           1) The general perception of the product - whether it is positive or

negative; 
           2) Aspect-based - regarding specific elements of the product; 
           3) Reaction to the Service - whether it is effective or not. May also
include more detailed analysis regarding particular aspects such as
response time or quality of interaction; 

 Intent Analysis for process automation - so that routine queries will

be handled automatic scenarios, such as frequently asked questions
and basic product use information. 
 Workflow management and customer prioritization. For example,
you have a disgruntled customer - his ticket is prioritized to be
processed as soon as possible. 

The most prominent example of using sentiment analysis in customer

support can be seen in big tech companies. 
Just think about how detailed and responsive are the troubleshooting
quizzes from Microsoft or Apple products. They are specifically designed
to generate as much information from the user as possible. 
Its purpose is twofold - it is used to solve an issue and also to give
additional insight into the peculiarity of the product use. 
As a result, the company can continuously map out the strong and weak
points of the product and related services and improve its quality
seamlessly.