Sentiment

How is sentiment determined?

Sentiment is based on language analysis. Words and terms are identified as positive or negative and then
evaluated by how closely they correlate to the terms in the query or topic. In saved topics “core terms”
can be set and the sentiment analysis is focused on those terms. Certain common terms generally not
meant to reflect sentiment but contain sentiment terms are excluded, i.e. “good morning” or “good night.”

How is sentiment reported?

There are two ways sentiment is reported – sentiment score and percentage of discussion. Once a
message is deemed positive, negative or neutral the percentage of the score can be displayed. In bar and
pie charts all three percentages are shown and in trend charts positive and negative are shown.
Sentiment score ranges from -5 points (negative) to 5 points (positive) at one decimal intervals.

How does the analysis work?

First a message is analyzed to see if sentiment in the message can be determined and if not it is
considered neutral. During positive/negative analysis the level of how positive or negative is considered
for sentiment score. The proximity of positive or negative words to the topic words impact the score. The
proportion of positive to negative incidence of messages is reflected in the score. Score would go up from
good to very good to great and down from bad to very bad to worst.

Are there any flaws or concerns?

While years of work in this analysis have gone into our analysis, since it is language based there are
challenges. Sarcasm is the most difficult element to overcome. Words in product or event names can
unexpectedly skew results. It is very hard to assess a statement like “My new Resident Evil game is
great.”

Running Sentiment Reports

Based on the complexity of the analysis sentiment reports regularly take longer to complete. They can
take up to 60 minutes to run. Setting the core terms allows the analysis to focus on the appropriate terms
and tends to increase accuracy. When making your determination of the core term, pick only those
keywords or phrases for which you want sentiment analysis applied. For example, give a topic
expression: Cadbury AND (chocolate OR cocoa OR candy or fudge) AND NOT (soda OR coffee or
mints) …
… if you wish to assure that sentiment aligns to the product name, choose as the core term only the
keyword: Cadbury. Under no circumstances should you select terms that are found in the AND NOT
clause (in the example above, do not choose soda, coffee, mints for core terms).