SentiDiff: Combining Textual Information and Sentiment Diffusion Patterns for Twitter Sentiment Analysis

Twitter sentiment analysis has become a hot research topic in recent years. Most of existing solutions to Twitter sentiment analysis basically only consider textual information of Twitter messages, and struggle to perform well when facing short and ambiguous Twitter messages. Recent studies show that sentiment diffusion patterns on Twitter have close relationships with sentiment polarities of Twitter messages. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on how to fuse textual information of Twitter messages and sentiment diffusion patterns to obtain better performance of sentiment analysis on Twitter data. To this end, we first analyze sentiment diffusion by investigating a phenomenon called sentiment reversal, and find some interesting properties of sentiment reversals. Then, we consider the inter-relationships between textual information of Twitter messages and sentiment diffusion patterns, and propose an iterative algorithm called SentiDiff to predict sentiment polarities expressed in Twitter messages. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to utilize sentiment diffusion patterns to help improve Twitter sentiment analysis. Extensive experiments on real-world dataset demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art textual information based sentiment analysis algorithms, our proposed algorithm yields PR-AUC improvements between 5.09 and 8.38 percent on Twitter sentiment classification tasks.