The rise in popularity and ubiquity of Twitter has made sentiment analysis of tweets an important and well-covered area of research. However, the 140 character limit imposed on tweets makes it hard to use standard linguistic methods for sentiment classification. On the other hand, what tweets lack in structure they make up with sheer volume and rich metadata. This metadata includes geolocation, temporal and author information. We hypothesize that sentiment is dependent on all these contextual factors. Different locations, times and authors have different emotional valences. In this paper, we explored this hypothesis by utilizing distant supervision to collect millions of labelled tweets from different locations, times and authors. We used this data to analyse the variation of tweet sentiments across different authors, times and locations. Once we explored and understood the relationship between these variables and sentiment, we used a Bayesian approach to combine these variables with more standard linguistic features such as n-grams to create a Twitter sentiment classifier. This combined classifier outperforms the purely linguistic classifier, showing that integrating the rich contextual information available on Twitter into sentiment classification is a promising direction of research.
There has also been previous work on measuring the happiness of people in different contexts (location, time, etc). This has been done mostly through traditional land-line polling @cite_6 @cite_5 , with Gallup's annual happiness index being a prime example @cite_5 . More recently, some have utilized Twitter to measure people's mood and happiness and have found Twitter to be a generally good measure of the public's overall happiness, well-being and mood. For example, @cite_13 used Twitter to measure the daily mood of the public and compare that to the record of social, political, cultural and economic events in the real world. They found that these events have a significant effect on the public mood as measured through Twitter. Another example would be the work of @cite_1 , in which they estimated the happiness levels of different states and cities in the USA using Twitter and found statistically significant correlations between happiness level and the demographic characteristics (such as obesity rates and education levels) of those regions. Finally, improving natural language processing by incorporating contextual information has been successfully attempted before @cite_11 @cite_0 ; but as far as we are aware, this has not been attempted for sentiment classification.
@cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_13 @cite_11
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We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 80 million words generated in 2011 on the social network service Twitter and (2) annually-surveyed characteristics of all 50 states and close to 400 urban populations. Among many results, we generate taxonomies of states and cities based on their similarities in word use; estimate the happiness levels of states and cities; correlate highly-resolved demographic characteristics with happiness levels; and connect word choice and message length with urban characteristics such as education levels and obesity rates. Our results show how social media may potentially be used to estimate real-time levels and changes in population-scale measures such as obesity rates. The increasing adoption of social media provides unprecedented opportunities to gain insight into human nature at vastly broader scales. Regarding the study of population-wide sentiment, prior research commonly focuses on text-based analyses and ignores a treasure trove of sentiment-laden content: images. In this paper, we make methodological and computational contributions by introducing the Smile Index as a formalized measure of societ al happiness. Detecting smiles in 9 million geo-located tweets over 16 months, we validate our Smile Index against both text-based techniques and self-reported happiness. We further make observational contributions by applying our metric to explore temporal trends in sentiment, relate public mood to societ al events, and predict economic indicators. Reflecting upon the innate, language-independent aspects of facial expressions, we recommend future improvements and applications to enable robust, global-level analyses. We conclude with implications for researchers studying and facilitating the expression of collective emotion through socio-technical systems. The language used in tweets from 1,300 different US counties was found to be predictive of the subjective well-being of people living in those counties as measured by representative surveys. Topics, sets of co-occurring words derived from the tweets using LDA, improved accuracy in predicting life satisfaction over and above standard demographic and socio-economic controls (age, gender, ethnicity, income, and education). The LDA topics provide a greater behavioural and conceptual resolution into life satisfaction than the broad socio-economic and demographic variables. For example, tied in with the psychological literature, words relating to outdoor activities, spiritual meaning, exercise, and good jobs correlate with increased life satisfaction, while words signifying disengagement like ’bored’ and ’tired’ show a negative association. Policy makers are calling for new socio-economic measures that reflect subjective well-being, to complement traditional measures of material welfare as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Self-reporting has been found to be reasonably accurate in measuring one's well-being and conveniently tallies with sentiment expressed on social media (e.g., those satisfied with life use more positive than negative words in their Facebook status updates). Social media content can thus be used to track well-being of individuals. A question left unexplored is whether such content can be used to track well-being of entire physical communities as well. To this end, we consider Twitter users based in a variety of London census communities, and study the relationship between sentiment expressed in tweets and community socio-economic well-being. We find that the two are highly correlated: the higher the normalized sentiment score of a community's tweets, the higher the community's socio-economic well-being. This suggests that monitoring tweets is an effective way of tracking community well-being too.