Valerio Basile - researcher in the Wimmics team of INRIA Multimedia Communications
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Sentiment Analysis on Twitter: The Case of Italian Language Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, is the branch of Natural Language Processing that deals with the identification of personal opinions and emotions in natural language. With the rise in popularity of Web-based social media platform such as Facebook and Twitter, the dimension of user-generated content has grown exponentially, thus representing a goldmine of information available to the researcher as well as to industries and institutions interested in monitoring the public opinion. In this talk I will present the work done on the collection of a large quantity of tweets written in Italian, and the result of the first experiments of sentiment analysis on such tweets. In the second part, I will talk about the experience of the Sentiment Polarity Classification shared task, the most popular task at the EVALITA evaluation campaign of 2014. The results of the participant systems show how the analysis of subjective, sometimes ironic, opinions on social media is far from being a solved problem. Finally, I will spend a few words on what could be the future of sentiment analysis on social media and how it could beneficially interact with related areas of natural language analysis such as Entity Linking.
