Michael Salter-Townshend (UCD)

will speak on

Analysis of Sentiment in Twitter

Time: 1:00PM
Date: Fri 25th February 2011
Location: Statistics Seminar Room- L550 Library building [map]

Abstract: This is early work on the analysis of sentiment in Twitter data. We have a large volume
(millions of tweets) from twitter.com and the goal is to analyse the sentiment contained in
the tweets. We have also manually labelled a small subset of commonly occurring words
and smileys as relating to either positive or negative sentiment.

We model the number of positive words in a tweet as Binomially distributed with mean
equal to the number of words in the tweet times the tweet sentiment. We employ an
EM algorithm where the E step calculates the expected sentiment label for the unlabelled
words appearing in the tweets and the M step nds maximum-likelihood estimates for the
sentiment in each tweet.

We present preliminary results and would like to discuss challenges, choices and extensions
to the work.

(This talk is part of the Working Group on Statistical Learning series.)

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