Using Freeware Resources to Analyse Sentiments in Social Media

The social media is gaining a lot of importance among businesshouses, academicians, medical practitioners, politicians, among others, due to its role in creating awareness about products, services, and socio-political views. The end users of these products, services, and views provide their feedbacks in the form of comments. An accurate determination of the sentiments of end users is crucial in designing policies and plans for products and services in future. As the processing power and storage capacities of computers have increased several folds, researchers can focus more on the accuracy of sentiment detection than consumption of computational resources. In this paper, we are applying a set of heuristics to analyse sentiments using freely available dictionary resources and open source tools. We have tested these heuristics over a large data set collected from standard sources. The experimental results are promising and opening new research directions in dictionary-based sentiment analysis.