Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions
sentiments evaluations attitudes and emotions from written language. It is one of the most
active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining
Web mining and text mining. In fact this research has spread outside of computer science to
the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a
whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media
such as reviews forum discussions blogs micro-blogs Twitter and social networks. For the
first time in human history we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital
form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and
social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key
influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality and the choices we make
are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason when we need
to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for
individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey
text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400
references. It is suitable for students researchers and practitioners who are interested in
social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily
use it in class for courses on natural language processing social media analysis text mining
and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online. Table of Contents: Preface
Sentiment Analysis: A Fascinating Problem The Problem of Sentiment Analysis Document
Sentiment Classification Sentence Subjectivity and Sentiment Classification Aspect-Based
Sentiment Analysis Sentiment Lexicon Generation Opinion Summarization Analysis of
Comparative Opinions Opinion Search and Retrieval Opinion Spam Detection Quality of
Reviews Concluding Remarks Bibliography Author Biography
