Using Twitter for Tapping Public Minds, Predict Trends and Generate Value

As the data sets in the world are growing at an exploding rate, research and analysis to derive value from this data has gained ground. Social media is a prime contributor to this data most of which is unstructured. The growing popularity of multimedia and mobile devices has created an overgrowing interconnected network where people are communicating on-the-go, sharing opinions on public forums, blogs, social networking websites. In this context, Twitter has emerged as a major platform to share one's ideas and opinions and millions of users are `tweeting' every second to generate a continuous influx of real-time data. Organizations are tapping into this data to gauge the general opinion or sentiment among the people and methods & techniques are being proposed for sentiment analysis & opinion mining. This has emerged as an active area of research and has a wide range of applications in every field.