The role of sentiment in the social web
Mike A Thelwall, Arvid Kappas · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
The expression of emotions is central to many offline and online social systems. For example, demonstrating empathy or support may help to build friendships in social network sites or to maintain friendships over time. In contrast, criticism and negative comments seem to be effective at starting discussions and are important when reviewing films or products online and when reacting to bad news reported in the media. In the context of many-to-many communication networks, such as the social web, the expression of emotions by individuals can serve as a trigger to elicit collective emotions. Complex patterns of dynamic exchanges over time may increase or dampen collective states. However, any understanding of such processes requires reliable quantitative methods to measure emotions. When assessing emotions in textual computer-mediated communication this is referred to as sentiment analysis. This chapter gives a brief overview of methods to automatically detect sentiment in social web texts and show how these sentiment analysis methods can be applied to large-scale studies of the social web.