getting into sentiment analysis

Question

I've got a requirement of determining whether the entered sentence is positive or negative.... First I thought it is something to do with Social Network analysis and later I realised that it is Sentiment analysis. My first question is what is the difference between these two? I think SNA itself uses SA... plz correct me if i am wrong...

Regarding this I got a very good discussion by Alexander @ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122595/nlp-qualitatively-positive-vs-negative-sentence...

I want to get into this field with the power of open source and preferably with Java (but I am open to others too). Can anyone pls guide me on how to get started and move ahead

Thanks in advance Siva

Answer 1

This is sentiment analysis.

Social Network Analysis doesn't really have anything to do with Sentiment Analysis - social network analysis deals with relationships between people or things - common problems deal with figuring out "clustering" or cliques within a social network, discovering group cohesion, prestige within groups, discovering "ringleaders", etc.

Sentiment analysis is much closer to natural language processing - taking some textual, audio or video content and attempting to classify it in some way - subjective/objective, agreement/disagreement, etc.

As for tools/APIs that support this - I googled and found this blog post listing several sentiment analysis and natural language processing tools.

Answer 2

Hi Siva,

RapidMiner is a powerful text mining and sentiment analysis tools. Rapid-I offers RapidMiner training courses on text mining and sentiment analysis: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Automated Market Research.

Best regards,

Frank