Reviewing Sentiment Analysis at the Microblog End

The social media space has evolved into a large labyrinth of information exchange platform and due to the growth in the adoption of different social media platforms; there has been an increasing wave of interests in sentiment analysis as a paradigm for the mining and analysis of users' opinions and sentiments based on their posts. In this paper, we present a review of contextual sentiment analysis on social media entries with a specific focus on Twitter. The sentimental analysis consists of two broad approaches which are machine learning which uses classification techniques to classify text, and is further categorized into supervised learning and unsupervised learning; and the lexicon-based approach which uses a dictionary without using any test or training data set, unlike the machine learning approach. The paper explores generic application areas including product/services analysis and security/terrorism investigations.