Sentiment Analysis of Social Media: Techniques, Applications, and Reliability

Abstract

Big data analytics can be used by smart cities to improve their citizens’ liveability, health, and wellbeing. Social surveys and also social media can be employed to engage with their communities, and these require sophisticated analysis techniques. Twitter and Reddit are ideal social media tools for natural language processing since they have predominantly text-based content. Data from these social media systems can be analysed to provide sentiment on issues of importance in near real-time for decision makers. Techniques such as word clouds can provide initial qualitative analysis while quantitative analysis can produce bar charts and time series of sentiment values. Access to the Twitter and Reddit APIs are described together with analysis techniques using Python libraries. The advantages and disadvantages of this type of analysis are discussed. Social media users tend to be concentrated in the more youthful and socially progressive social cohorts, which may cause bias.