A context-based model for sentiment analysis in twitter

Most of the recent literature on Sentiment Analysis over Twitter is tied to the idea that the sentiment is a function of an incoming tweet. However, tweets are filtered through streams of posts, so that a wider context, e.g. A topic, is always available. In this work, the contribution of this contextual information is investigated. We modeled the polarity detection problem as a sequential classification task over streams of tweets. A Markovian formulation of the Support Vector Machine discriminative model as embodied by the SVMhmm algorithm has been here employed to assign the sentiment polarity to entire sequences. The experimental evaluation proves that sequential tagging effectively embodies evidence about the contexts and is able to reach a relative increment in detection accuracy of around 20% in F1 measure. These results are particularly interesting as the approach is flexible and does not require manually coded resources.