Like It or Not: A Survey of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Methods

Sentiment analysis in Twitter is a field that has recently attracted research interest. Twitter is one of the most popular microblog platforms on which users can publish their thoughts and opinions. Sentiment analysis in Twitter tackles the problem of analyzing the tweets in terms of the opinion they express. This survey provides an overview of the topic by investigating and briefly describing the algorithms that have been proposed for sentiment analysis in Twitter. The presented studies are categorized according to the approach they follow. In addition, we discuss fields related to sentiment analysis in Twitter including Twitter opinion retrieval, tracking sentiments over time, irony detection, emotion detection, and tweet sentiment quantification, tasks that have recently attracted increasing attention. Resources that have been used in the Twitter sentiment analysis literature are also briefly presented. The main contributions of this survey include the presentation of the proposed approaches for sentiment analysis in Twitter, their categorization according to the technique they use, and the discussion of recent research trends of the topic and its related fields.