What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing digital text to determine if the emotional tone of the
message is positive, negative, or neutral. Today, companies have large volumes of text data like
emails, customer support chat transcripts, social media comments, and reviews. Sentiment analysis
tools can scan this text to automatically determine the author’s attitude towards a topic. Companies
use the insights from sentiment analysis to improve customer service and increase brand
reputation.

Why is sentiment analysis important?

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is an important business intelligence tool that
helps companies improve their products and services. We give some benefits of sentiment analysis
below.

Provide objective insights

Businesses can avoid personal bias associated with human reviewers by using artificial intelligence
(AI)–based sentiment analysis tools. As a result, companies get consistent and objective results
when analyzing customers’ opinions.

For example, consider the following sentence:

I'm amazed by the speed of the processor but disappointed that it heats up quickly.

Marketers might dismiss the discouraging part of the review and be positively biased towards the
processor's performance. However, accurate sentiment analysis tools sort and classify text to pick
up emotions objectively.

Build better products and services

A sentiment analysis system helps companies improve their products and services based on
genuine and specific customer feedback. AI technologies identify real-world objects or situations
(called entities) that customers associate with negative sentiment. From the above example, product
engineers focus on improving the processor's heat management capability because the text analysis
software associated disappointed (negative) with processor (entity) and heats up (entity).

Analyze at scale
Businesses constantly mine information from a vast amount of unstructured data, such as emails,
chatbot transcripts, surveys, customer relationship management records, and product feedback.
Cloud-based sentiment analysis tools allow businesses to scale the process of uncovering customer
emotions in textual data at an affordable cost.

Real-time results
Businesses must be quick to respond to potential crises or market trends in today's fast-changing
landscape. Marketers rely on sentiment analysis software to learn what customers feel about the
company's brand, products, and services in real time and take immediate actions based on their
findings. They can configure the software to send alerts when negative sentiments are detected for
specific keywords.

What are sentiment analysis use cases?

Businesses use sentiment analysis to derive intelligence and form actionable plans in different
areas.

Improve customer service

Customer support teams use sentiment analysis tools to personalize responses based on the mood
of the conversation. Matters with urgency are spotted by artificial intelligence (AI)–based chatbots
with sentiment analysis capability and escalated to the support personnel.

Brand monitoring
Organizations constantly monitor mentions and chatter around their brands on social media, forums,
blogs, news articles, and in other digital spaces. Sentiment analysis technologies allow the public
relations team to be aware of related ongoing stories. The team can evaluate the underlying mood to
address complaints or capitalize on positive trends.

Market research
A sentiment analysis system helps businesses improve their product offerings by learning what
works and what doesn't. Marketers can analyze comments on online review sites, survey responses,
and social media posts to gain deeper insights into specific product features. They convey the
findings to the product engineers who innovate accordingly.

Track campaign performance

Marketers use sentiment analysis tools to ensure that their advertising campaign generates the
expected response. They track conversations on social media platforms and ensure that the overall
sentiment is encouraging. If the net sentiment falls short of expectation, marketers tweak the
campaign based on real-time data analytics.

How does sentiment analysis work?

Sentiment analysis is an application of natural language processing (NLP) technologies that train
computer software to understand text in ways similar to humans. The analysis typically goes through
several stages before providing the final result.

Preprocessing
During the preprocessing stage, sentiment analysis identifies key words to highlight the core
message of the text.

 Tokenization breaks a sentence into several elements or tokens.

 Lemmatization converts words into their root form. For example, the root form of am is be.
  Stop-word removal filters out words that don't add meaningful value to the sentence. For
example, with, for, at, and of are stop words.

Keyword analysis
NLP technologies further analyze the extracted keywords and give them a sentiment score. A
sentiment score is a measurement scale that indicates the emotional element in the sentiment
analysis system. It provides a relative perception of the emotion expressed in text for analytical
purposes. For example, researchers use 10 to represent satisfaction and 0 for disappointment when
analyzing customer reviews.

What are the approaches to sentiment analysis?

There are three main approaches used by sentiment analysis software.

Rule-based
The rule-based approach identifies, classifies, and scores specific keywords based on
predetermined lexicons. Lexicons are compilations of words representing the writer's intent, emotion,
and mood. Marketers assign sentiment scores to positive and negative lexicons to reflect the
emotional weight of different expressions. To determine if a sentence is positive, negative, or
neutral, the software scans for words listed in the lexicon and sums up the sentiment score. The final
score is compared against the sentiment boundaries to determine the overall emotional bearing.

Rule-based analysis example

Consider a system with words like happy, affordable, and fast in the positive lexicon and words
like poor, expensive, and difficult in a negative lexicon. Marketers determine positive word scores
from 5 to 10 and negative word scores from -1 to -10. Special rules are set to identify double
negatives, such as not bad, as a positive sentiment. Marketers decide that an overall sentiment
score that falls above 3 is positive, while - 3 to 3 is labeled as mixed sentiment.

Pros and cons

A rule-based sentiment analysis system is straightforward to set up, but it's hard to scale. For
example, you'll need to keep expanding the lexicons when you discover new keywords for conveying
intent in the text input. Also, this approach may not be accurate when processing sentences
influenced by different cultures.

ML
This approach uses machine learning (ML) techniques and sentiment classification algorithms, such
as neural networks and deep learning, to teach computer software to identify emotional sentiment
from text. This process involves creating a sentiment analysis model and training it repeatedly on
known data so that it can guess the sentiment in unknown data with high accuracy.

Training
During the training, data scientists use sentiment analysis datasets that contain large numbers of
examples. The ML software uses the datasets as input and trains itself to reach the predetermined
conclusion. By training with a large number of diverse examples, the software differentiates and
determines how different word arrangements affect the final sentiment score.

Pros and cons

ML sentiment analysis is advantageous because it processes a wide range of text information

accurately. As long as the software undergoes training with sufficient examples, ML sentiment
analysis can accurately predict the emotional tone of the messages. However, a trained ML model is
specific to one business area. This means sentiment analysis software trained with marketing data
cannot be used for social media monitoring without retraining.

Hybrid
Hybrid sentiment analysis works by combining both ML and rule-based systems. It uses features
from both methods to optimize speed and accuracy when deriving contextual intent in text. However,
it takes time and technical efforts to bring the two different systems together.

What are the different types of sentiment analysis?

Businesses use different types of sentiment analysis to understand how their customers feel when
interacting with products or services.

Fine-grained scoring
Fine-grained sentiment analysis refers to categorizing the text intent into multiple levels of emotion.
Typically, the method involves rating user sentiment on a scale of 0 to 100, with each equal segment
representing very positive, positive, neutral, negative, and very negative. Ecommerce stores use a 5-
star rating system as a fine-grained scoring method to gauge purchase experience.

Aspect-based
Aspect-based analysis focuses on particular aspects of a product or service. For example, laptop
manufacturers survey customers on their experience with sound, graphics, keyboard, and touchpad.
They use sentiment analysis tools to connect customer intent with hardware-related keywords.

Intent-based
Intent-based analysis helps understand customer sentiment when conducting market research.
Marketers use opinion mining to understand the position of a specific group of customers in the
purchase cycle. They run targeted campaigns on customers interested in buying after picking up
words like discounts, deals, and reviews in monitored conversations.

Emotional detection
Emotional detection involves analyzing the psychological state of a person when they are writing the
text. Emotional detection is a more complex discipline of sentiment analysis, as it goes deeper than
merely sorting into categories. In this approach, sentiment analysis models attempt to interpret
various emotions, such as joy, anger, sadness, and regret, through the person's choice of words.

What are the challenges in sentiment analysis?

Despite advancements in natural language processing (NLP) technologies, understanding human
language is challenging for machines. They may misinterpret finer nuances of human
communication such as those given below.

Sarcasm
It is extremely difficult for a computer to analyze sentiment in sentences that comprise sarcasm.
Consider the following sentence, Yeah, great. It took three weeks for my order to arrive. Unless the
computer analyzes the sentence with a complete understanding of the scenario, it will label the
experience as positive based on the word great.

Negation
Negation is the use of negative words to convey a reversal of meaning in the sentence. For
example, I wouldn't say the subscription was expensive. Sentiment analysis algorithms might have
difficulty interpreting such sentences correctly, particularly if the negation happens across two
sentences, such as, I thought the subscription was cheap. It wasn't.

Multipolarity
Multipolarity occurs when a sentence contains more than one sentiment. For example, a product
review reads, I'm happy with the sturdy build but not impressed with the color. It becomes difficult for
the software to interpret the underlying sentiment. You'll need to use aspect-based sentiment
analysis to extract each entity and its corresponding emotion.

What is semantic analysis?

Semantic analysis is a computer science term for understanding the meaning of words in text
information. It uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to make sense of
the relationship between words and grammatical correctness in sentences.

Sentiment analysis vs. semantic analysis

A sentiment analysis solution categorizes text by understanding the underlying emotion. It works by
training the ML algorithm with specific datasets or setting rule-based lexicons. Meanwhile, a
semantic analysis understands and works with more extensive and diverse information. Both
linguistic technologies can be integrated to help businesses understand their customers better.

How does AWS help with sentiment analysis?

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) solution that helps businesses extract
and identify meaningful insights from text documents. It uses machine learning (ML) technologies to
perform sentiment analysis with automated text extraction. Companies train Amazon Comprehend
with industry-specific documents to produce highly accurate results.
 Amazon Comprehend Sentiment Analysis API tells developers if a piece of text is positive,
negative, neutral, or mixed.
 Amazon Comprehend Targeted Sentiment allows businesses to narrow sentiment analysis to
specific parts of products or services.
 Amazon Comprehend supports multiple languages, including German, English, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, and French.