A novel sentiment analysis of social networks using supervised learning

Online microblog-based social networks have been used for expressing public opinions through short messages. Among popular microblogs, Twitter has attracted the attention of several researchers in areas like predicting the consumer brands, democratic electoral events, movie box office, popularity of celebrities, the stock market, etc. Sentiment analysis over a Twitter-based social network offers a fast and efficient way of monitoring the public sentiment. This paper studies the sentiment prediction task over Twitter using machine-learning techniques, with the consideration of Twitter-specific social network structure such as retweet. We also concentrate on finding both direct and extended terms related to the event and thereby understanding its effect. We employed supervised machine-learning techniques such as support vector machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, maximum entropy and artificial neural networks to classify the Twitter data using unigram, bigram and unigram + bigram (hybrid) feature extraction model for the case study of US Presidential Elections 2012 and Karnataka State Assembly Elections (India) 2013. Further, we combined the results of sentiment analysis with the influence factor generated from the retweet count to improve the prediction accuracy of the task. Experimental results demonstrate that SVM outperforms all other classifiers with maximum accuracy of 88% in predicting the outcome of US Elections 2012, and 68% for Indian State Assembly Elections 2013.