Online sentiment analysis: potentialities, criticalities, perspectives

WARM: Workshop on Advanced Research Methods

Urbino, 30 Settembre 2010

Romana Andò

WEB 2.0 : an amazing opportunity for research

• we can use Web 2.0 to analyze relationships in SNS, as Social Network Analysis researchers did to study, in face to face relationship, both formal and informal groups.

• in Web 2.0 environments we can find expressions of the participatory culture, and an amazingly deep connection between audiences (fans) and media products (tv shows, in our case)

Once upon a time…

• Research project “TV++”, promoted by Fondazione Bordoni , Dipartimento per le comunicazioni del Ministero per lo sviluppo economico , with CATTID-Sapienza- University of Rome

• The project is about new forms of television and convergence between different screens (tv, internet)

• One application we used is Sentiment Analysis focused on tv programs and contents

• We are constructing a specific italian lexicon • We use a focused crawler on blogs and tweets

about television contents

Issues on the agenda

• What is sentiment analysis?• To which contexts of use and objects of

analysis has it been applied up to now?• What kind of output can it give us? • How is it different from other kinds of

audience measurement systems?

Sentiment Analysis 101

When an individual is interested in a media product, he/she would• express evaluations in its regard: these evaluations

could be impromptu and / or rationally or emotionally based (opinion and sentiment).

• these evaluations will be read, assessed and appropriated by others, who will relate with an object / product they have valued, borrowing attitudes and motivations from the web (personal influence and opinion leaders theories).

(Lazarsfeld, Berelson, H.Gaudet)

Sentiment Analysis 101

Sentiment Analysis applies automated analytical methods to web conversations (within social media) and focuses on:• Identifying words or phrases bearing opinions• Identifying the general orientation of these opinions

(in particular for adjectives, adverbs, verbs)• Classifying sentences or documents by the polarity

of their opinions.

(Tianxia)

Sentiment Analysis 101

With Sentiment Analysis,• We are able to work with large-scale data, not

easily recoverable with other methodologies, • We can transform users’ subjectivity in statistically

quantifiable and legible data, over time and, often, in real time.

• We can weigh the popularity of a product or a brand, quantifying its mentions and identifying the positive or negative polarity of consumers’ opinions.

What we can do with Sentiment Analysis

• We can certify the existence of a certain phenomena (it is not just the result of our speculations on Web 2.0, WOM and on the role of social networks)

• We can objectify and measure it, in order to quantify the online buzz and make it a manageable and controllable research object

• We can understand the positive or negative opinion polarity on specific objects of consumption, including media products, and try to use it in forecasting and development.

Sentiment Analysis 101

In the end, Sentiment Analysis is:• “…translating the vagaries of human emotion into

hard data” [primarily in the online world] Mining the web for feelings, not facts (NYT)

• “…us[ing] automated tools to discern, extract and process attitudinal information found in text…” Sentiment Analysis: Opportunities and Challenges (Grimes, 2008)

• “…an attempt to automatically process and possibly learn from the universe of people’s online chatter”

Why blogs?

• Blogs and microblogs are greatly diffused on the Web

• They are dynamic and open (i.e. VS message boards) for crawler search

• They are multi-thematic• They are the place in which individuals express

their subjectivity through comments, reviews, ratings, experiences, suggestions.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS = AUDITEL + QUALITEL?

Desperately seeking audience

• The quantitative research tools, in fact, offer to the researchers the illusory certainty of having the pulse of the situation, hiding behind the persuasive power of data the uncertainty deriving from consumption behaviours less and less explicable and quantitatively justifiable.

• Though monitoring and measuring instruments can lead us to meticulous and accurate representations, their descriptive realism can not be sufficient for the control, because it does not prescribe a behavior. (Ang)

Quick research a immersive research?

• I still think that sentiment analysis could be viewed a bit too hastily as a way to correct the simple systems of statistical audience measurement, based on two central questions : who is watching? and what are they watching?

• We are adding the like / dislike polarity, but still aren’t thinking about how? or why?

MARKET RESEARCH – EMPIRIC SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH. HYBRIDIZATIONS OR REWRITINGS?

What questions should we pose? / 1

How do we differ from the companies that want to know the progress of their brand, which features of their products work, what are the competitive brands and how to orient the market surreptitiously inserting self-produced items within the Buzz?

What questions should we pose? / 1

• Dealing with media, we are aware of the difference between financial and cultural economy (Fiske).

• Sentiment analysis was born in the academy but is nowadays subservient to a financial logic, not to a cultural one.

• The academy should think about how to adapt Sentiment Analysis to our needs for knowledge

What questions should we pose? / 2

• Tracing the life of a commercial product in the WOM is way easier than tracing the never ending life of a media product.

• The remediation phenomena that - thanking audiences’ productivity, spreading from a semiotic contribution to grassroot production - surrounds media contents, make the media an interesting object of research, but one that is also ephemeral, fickle and elusive.

What questions should we pose? / 3

• We are interested in audiences.• We are not only interested in understanding what

they are watching and if they like it or not, but also how and why.

• Since the why is explained by Fiske’s articulation, I am invested in understanding how audiences make sense of media content and how they link it to their personal experiences.

What questions should we pose? / 3

Since we are cultural processes sociologists , we must ask ourselves whether it is enough for us - as it seems to be for the market – to look for opinions, assess trends, follow the success / failure curve of a brand or, rather, if we should understand experiences?

The role of lexicon

• Using different lexicons for research, some more oriented on understand the rating, others focused on relating comments to individual experiences –

• it comes to my mind that we should think about identifying lexicons through qualitative research (i.e. identifying the keywords, the transitional objects of a generation as the experience of the We Search Project? )

THE ROLES OF CONTEXT AND SOCIAL BOND

The role of context

• This is a theoretical problem, but also a methodological one: sentiment analysis researchers deal with the difficulties of standardized interpretation of phrases and words can only have a meaning when they are contextualized

The role of active users

• Another problem area is the need to filter the presence of really active users, who produce most of the speeches, from the database of posts.

• Thus, we need to create a sort of cluster related to the involvement level and the production activities of users.

Personal Influence and Sentiment Analysis

• Sentiment analysis is oriented towards the identification of influential individuals, evoking the concept of Personal Influence and adapting it to Web 2.0.

• In this way, the focus shifts on the relational dimension of opinion construction and negotiation.

• Hence the importance of a necessary re-evaluation of the concept of Personal Influence as related to opinion mining.

The relationship impact

• We need to focus more on the network of subjects and on the relationships between them (Social network analysis) and less on the expression of opinions and views on a product.

• And we need to analyze the impact that these opinions have on other members of the audience.

ALGORITHMS VS. ETHNOGRAPHIC GAZE

What kind of gaze on Web research

The problem with Web research isn’t to have enough answers for a proper analysis, but how to select and process materials from the endless flow of information (Jenkins), using methods based on:• a depth of the look that is only manageable in micro

communities and not on the entire blogging and microblogging world (terabytes of data, as claimed by engineers)

• observing Web interactions as if they were natural (researcher in position of a cyberspace lurker, invisible and supposedly able to see everything)

Serial Istinct Research

• Two years ago we were conducting the research Serial Instinct. Sulle tracce fandom, with the same exploration (there is a phenomena? How big?) and cognitive (what's the meaning of this?) needs, we worked on online message boards focused on TV shows.

• I think we have fulfilled the task of showing the existence of fandom in Italy, we have interpreted it consistently, we have identified trends in practices, consumer orientation and reception, but we have not adequately explained what ties audiences to a specific media content.

• On the other hand, we are also aware that the attention for quantitative methods has emerged to contrast the limitations of the ethnographic gaze.

TEMPORARY CONCLUSION

What we expect

• Reading in a very positive way the cultural contribution of Web 2.0, we should expect from these processes a significant revolution in terms of audience participation and involvement, since audiences use online expression of views and comments as a trigger for broader social practices related to media consumption. We are dealing with a form of participation and involvement that results in commitment and engagement.

Engagement is “coinvolgimento”

• We often translate "engagement" with the term coinvolgimento which, in my opinion, refers more to the emotional dimension of being linked to an object, rather than to the dimension of the commitment, and is definitely not exhaustive.

Engagement is …

• Engagement is in the task of decoding a text , • Engagement is spending time consuming a media

product, but also is to conceive media use as a series of appointments at a given time

• Engagement is a commitment with yourself and with media content.

• Engagement is still what characterizes audiences’ critical analysis of texts, information retrieval and knowledge building, subtitle translation from one language to another and creative production.

Engagement is…

• And above all, engagement is what drives the audience to perceive a seamless transition from a local experience to a mediated one, to make public their thoughts and feeling, and to be compelled to participate (an idea echoed in the concept of civic engagement).

• “Engagement” translates the concepts of emotional involvement, empathy, passion, and loyalty, but – because of the potential for interpersonal connection of Web 2.0 - always tends to shift the focus from a dimension of individual perception and interpretation to a social and ultimately , relational one.