"It's Modern Day Presidential! An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Sentiment Analysis Tools on President Donald Trump's Tweets"

Abstract

This paper reports on an evaluation of five commonly used, lexicon-based sentiment analysis tools (MeaningCloud, ParallelDots, Repustate, RSentiment for R, SentiStrength), tested for accuracy against a collection of Trump’s tweets spanning from election day November 2016 to one year post inauguration (January 2018). Repustate was found to be the most accurate at 67.53%. Our preliminary analysis suggests that this percentage reflects Trump’s frequent inclusion of both positive and negative sentiments in a single tweet. Additionally to providing an evaluative comparison of sentiment analysis tools, a summary of shared features of a number of existing datasets containing Twitter content along with a comprehensive discussion is also provided.