Proceedings of the 11th INDIACom; INDIACom-2017; IEEE Conference ID: 40353

2017 4 International Conference on “Computing for Sustainable Global Development”, 01st - 03rd March, 2017
th

Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management (BVICAM), New Delhi (INDIA)

A study on live Sentiment Analysis using Twitter data

Devesh Agrawal HimeshKulshrestha AkanshaTanwar
Department of Computer Scie Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
BVCOE, New Delhi-110063 BVCOE, New Delhi-110063 BVCOE, New Delhi-110063
Email ID: dagrawal1096@gmail.com Email ID: himeshkulshrestha@gmail.com Email ID: akanshatanwar14@gmail.com

Chirag Bansal Saurabh Chawla

Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
BVCOE, New Delhi-110063 BVCOE, New Delhi-110063
Email ID: bansalchirag1994@gmail.com Email ID: saurabh.chawla2308@yahoo.in

Abstract—In the recent times, the number of social they can give the people what they want. Large political houses
networking and blogging sites have grown at a tremendous are more active on active in online promotion than offline
pace and so have the number of their users. These sites provide campaigning. More and more researchers are trying to dive deep
a platform to users where they can share their opinions and into the subject of opinion mining or sentiment analysis.
sentiments about various things related to different fields like
Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining involves finding out
movies, politics etc. Twitter is such a popular microblogging
site where users share their opinions, sentiments, emotions and relevant information from source material using techniques like
other in the form of short texts and images. It has a large Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. It is
outreach with millions of users and thus is an outstanding usually aimed at finding out what the speaker/writer meant while
source of opinion collection and sentiment analysis. In this saying/writing the sentence.
paper, we try to perform sentiment analysis by collecting data Twitter has about 317 million monthly active users currently and
from the Twitter using its API and using natural language thus it serves as one of the most favored, reliable and easy to use
processing and machine learning algorithms like Naïve Bayes datasource for sentiment analysis. It has a large database with
algorithm and its variants, Logistic Regression, Support Vector about 500 million tweets added every day and thus there is
Clustering. We also try to identify the challenges and problems
abundant data to be used. Tweets on Twitter are 140 character
associated with these existing algorithms.
long messages which involve text, emoji and links. All Users
Keywords—Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Twitter, have a username which is called a handle and they tweet using
classifier, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector that handle only. So, while using Twitter data, we are actually
Clustering using these tweets as they represent the emotions, opinions,
judgements, facts which the users share. We use this Twitter data
I. INTRODUCTION using an API (Application Programming Interface) service
Every person has opinions and sentiments and he takes them known as Tweepy. This service allows us to stream live tweets
into account while making any important decision. These from the Twitter website and perform live sentiment analysis,
opinions and sentiments of a person about a particular thing this helps us generate real time data which can be extremely
depend on a lot of factors including natural instincts, useful in many cases like elections where a party might want to
personality but more than that we depend upon opinions of see real time sentiments of people.
other people about that thing. For example, if we have to
watch a particular movie, we rely on other people’s review II. RELATED WORK
about that movie more than anything else and more the One of the first works in the field of Sentiment Analysis was
number of reviewers, more we become confident about Pang et Al [1], they tried to find out whether sentiment analysis
whether the movie is good or bad. So, social media sites like can be treated as a topic based categorization (topics being
Twitter as a microblogging service provide its users an area positive and negative sentiments) or a special sentiment
where they can check, collect and see what other people feel classification method has to be developed. They experimented by
about a product or they may even find people with different trying some Machine Learning algorithms on a movie review
or similar sentiments than theirs. This helps people make dataset. While they simply based their experiment on counting
decisions. This type of decision making is not only restricted positive and negative words in a document or in other words,
to a normal person, it is rapidly extending to various and document level classification, some other works like Esuli and
widely divergent fields like in business operations, stocks, Sebastiani, 2006[2] focused on learning polarity of words and
marketing, sales, political or even moral issues. More and phrases. When talking about analysis of Twitter data, some of
more companies are tending towards social media for the major approached were by Kouloumpis et al. [3] who
gathering popular opinion about their products, then they explored the microblogging features including emoticons,
customize their products according to the reviews so that abbreviations and the presence of intensifiers such as all-caps
Copy Right © INDIACom-2017; ISSN 0973-7529; ISBN 978-93-80544-24-3 6053
 Proceedings of the 11th INDIACom; INDIACom-2017; IEEE Conference ID: 40353
2017 4 International Conference on “Computing for Sustainable Global Development”, 01st - 03rd March, 2017
th
and character repetitions for Twitter sentiment classification,
they experienced a great success rate when they worked with
lexicons tagged with their priority but when they included
Part of Speech (POS) in their experiments the results
experienced a drop. Barbosa et al.(2010) [4] performed
sentiment analysis in two phases.
First, they classified tweets as objective or subjective and
then, the subjective tweets were classified as positive or
negative. They included retweets, hashtags, link, punctuation
and exclamation marks in conjunction with features like
prior polarity of words and POS in their datasets. Turney et
al [5] used bag-of-words method which involves treating
words as separate with no relationship in between two words
at all. And finally, for sentiment analysis they determined the
sentiment for every word and used some functions to reach
at a result. Observing this, we came to a conclusion that
POS, lexicon and features like hashtags, links are the most
important features for sentiment analysis. Our approach
doesn’t involve making a dictionary out of words or
emoticons as done by Agarwal et Al [6], rather we try to do
our classification of positive and negative words by using the
corpus provided to us by Natural Language Toolkit (a
module provided by Python).
III. OUR PROCESS
Fig. 1. This figure depicts an overview of the process used for project
implementation.
The detailed steps are as follows:
A. Extraction
Tweepy service which we used for our data gathering
purpose provides the data in JSON (JavaScript Object
Notation) format which actually is a dictionary like data
format which is in the form of a key and a value pair. We
then obtain all the data which we want using the value part
Copy Right © INDIACom-2017; ISSN 0973-7529; ISBN 978-93-80544-24-3
of the data and not the key part. This gives us all the tweets
which are raw, meaning they contain all the slangs,
abbreviations, emoji, links and other irrelevant part of things.
B. Preprocessing
We used Natural Language Toolkit(NLTK) module provided by
Python Software Foundation, along with this module there
comes a large set of varied corpora (a body of text), these
corpora vary from the bible to political speeches. We then create
two sets of reviews, one positive and the other negative using
one of the corpora.
We use these documents to create a word list as follows:
1. We append a ‘pos’ to all the words present in the
positive dataset and a ‘neg’ to all the words present in the
negative dataset This will serve as a classification
mechanism (because we created two categories) later for our
Machine Learning algorithms.
2. We use part of speech tagging to identify all the
adjectives and adverbs in both the datasets.
3. We, then create a word list merging both the positive
words and negative words.
The review files we used, had a lot of reviews (~10000) and each
review contained a lot of words (~400), so, there is bound to be a
lot of words which are used less than the others, these words
according to common language terms are also used less than
other words, for example a person is more habitual of using a
word like ‘great’ rather than ‘insuperable’. So, we identify all
these words using the method called FreqDist present in NLTK
module. This will create a dictionary with the word as key and its
frequency as the value. Next, we separate 5000 most commonly
used words. This will give us a balanced dataset with most
commonly used positive and negative words.
After finishing with preprocessing of these words, we are left
with cleansing and normalizing our tweets. We remove all the
hashtags, emoji and unreadable characters from the tweet. We
also remove links as they don’t count in the sentiment analysis
process. This will give us a relatively clean and normal database.
C. Classification
After we have created a nice database, we then used the Machine
Learning Algorithms to predict and calculate how they fair on it.
Python comes with a module called Scikit-learn (or sklearn).
This module provides prebuilt codes for machine learning
algorithms and we can use them as functions to classify our
documents.
We use our positive and negative review documents as training
datasets for the algorithms and use similar documents as our
testing set, using them we measure the algorithm accuracy.
When we classify the documents using a training dataset, a
classifier is created, we can save this classifier using pickling so
that we won’t need to train that classifier again.
And then we can use this classifier on our twitter dataset for our
final results.
We have used different algorithms, although they are based on
the same premise: Naïve Bayes Algorithm, Bernoulli Naïve
Bayes Algorithm, Multinomial Naïve Bayes Algorithm.
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A study on live Sentiment Analysis using Twitter data

1) Naïve Bayes Algorithm: It uses Bayes’ theorem and its D. Testing

most prominent feature is that it assumes independence We then create a classifier of our own, this classifier will run the
between features of a variable. For instance, if a testing data on all the pickled classifiers, it will check which
particular thing has 5 different features, this algorithm classifier gave the most accurate result and will then return the
will assume that they are all independent of each other accuracy of that classifier.
although their might be correlation between them.Naive After this, we performed its final test on the Twitter data we
Bayes classifier is very efficient, scalable and favored wanted to analyze. We create a separate script containing the
form of classification primarily because of its high low code to access the pickles and our classifier and another one to
dependence on computational power and it can also live stream tweets from the website. Sentiment analysis on these
work with low amount of training data. tweets are performed by calling the other script from this script.
Here are some of the results (Figure 2) we got after running the
2) Multinomial Naïve Bayes Algorithm: script:
This algorithm is used for analysis ofmultinomially
distributed data. Here, the training samples represent the
frequencies associated with the events.Therefore, it
takes into account the number of occurrences of a class
variable including multiple occurrences.
3) Bernoulli Naïve Bayes Algorithm:
It is used for datasets which are distributed according to
multivariate Bernoulli distributions. It also identifies
each feature as Boolean (1 or 0). This differs from the
multinomial distribution because it takes into account
the non-occurring features, which means that if one
feature is missing then Bernoulli distribution will
penalize it unlike Multinomial system.
It also does not count multiple occurrences of words
which results in a lot of error prone results and thus low Fig. 2. This picture shows the results obtained on executing the final program on
a live twitter feed.
accuracy.
4) Logistic Regression:
It is a predictive, statistical method for analysis used
when the dataset is binary.
It is primarily used for fitting a model so that a relation
can be described between a binary variable and some
independent variables. It utilizes logistic cumulative
density function for this purpose. It actually is very
useful in prediction datasets as it forces the output to be
between 0 and 1 which helps to find probabilistic
values.
5) Support Vector Clustering:
Clustering deals with data organization [10]. It basically
deals with dividing data into groups so that they can be
more organized and useful. So, basically clustering data
can be performed in many different ways, one is
hierarchical clustering where groups are divided using
their similarity, the more commonly used way is
Support Vector Clustering, it identifies certain low used
points in the datasets and names them as “valleys”, these Fig. 3. This picture is a snippet of the live program execution.
“valleys” are then treated as boundaries partitioning
In the results, the tweets text is presented is first, then a keyword
main data containing regions.
‘pos’ for positive tweet and ‘neg’ for negative tweet followed by
A kernel function is used for this purpose which may
the confidence measure of the analyzing algorithm.
take different parameters and create a map linking the
After this, we then tried to plot the results obtained on a graph
data to a high dimensional feature space. This high
for better visualization, the graph on the y-axis shows the
dimensional feature space has a sphere which when
positivity or the negativity of the tweet and on the x-axis are the
mapped back to the data space gives us a closely bound
tweets so every point on the graph represents a tweet with its
region of contours. This region is then named as a
cluster.
Copy Right © INDIACom-2017; ISSN 0973-7529; ISBN 978-93-80544-24-3 6055
 Proceedings of the 11th INDIACom; INDIACom-2017; IEEE Conference ID: 40353
2017 4 International Conference on “Computing for Sustainable Global Development”, 01st - 03rd March, 2017
th
sentiment value. We created a live streaming graph using
matplotlib (a python module).
Fig. 4. Using Tweepy, we can search for tweets which all contain a
particular keyword, in this particular example we used the term ‘Modi’.
IV. RESULT
The experiment we tried to conduct was to analyze how
different algorithms fair when they are put against a new
type of word list and live twitter stream. We checked
multiple algorithms from Logistic Regression, Support
Vector Clustering to old Naïve Bayes and its variants.
The obtained results along with the accuracy obtained for
different algorithms are given below:
Table 1: Results Obtained.
Algorithms Applied Acccuracy obtained
Naïve Bayes 65-70%
Bernoulli Naïve Bayes 67-69%
Multinomial Naïve Bayes 70-75%
Logistic Regression 65-68%
Support Vector Clustering 60-66%
As we can see, the results we get using Multinomial
Naïve Bayes algorithm are the best in accuracy, due to the
fact that this algorithm was primarily built for text
classification itself and tasks like sentiment analysis. It
essentially takes into count the frequencies of the words used
which is not seen with other algorithms.
The poor accuracy of support vector clustering gives the
reason why it is not preferred for sentiment analysis. In the
way we have created our database and then used it on a
totally different dataset, this method tries to over fit the
model and instead of better accuracy its main focus is on
covering the whole dataset points.
Naïve Bayes, being the oldest technique is able to
perform well slightly because of its capability to perform
good because of it being a supervised method of learning. It
Copy Right © INDIACom-2017; ISSN 0973-7529; ISBN 978-93-80544-24-3
however underperforms in comparison to its derivatives
Bernoulli Naïve Bayes and Multinomial Naïve Bayes.
Logistic Regression is more commonly used when the data
points are large in number. So, for example here we have a small
collection of dataset for each positive and negative category, this
hampers its accuracy. It is more stable when the sample size is
large according to [1-14].
CONCLUSION
Sentiment Analysis is rapidly gaining momentum as one of
the leading technologies in the emerging world. This paper tried
to find out how it would fair in a real life scenario, for example
during a live debate of presidential elections, how people react to
different point of views.
We use algorithms such as Support Vector Machines and
Logistic Regression but after studying previous works [1-9] we
found that they are not much better than Naïve Bayes. Thus, it
can be concluded that the need for a better algorithm for
sentiment analysis is the need for the hour.
V. FUTURE SCOPE
Different data extraction techniques can be utilized.
Apart from Twitter, multiple data sources and data filtering
techniques can be used to find out relevant results.
We have not used a purely correct context, for example in the
dataset we use for training, in the movie review dataset a term
‘hit’ can be used for a movie which was very successful, but in
the context of tweets, a person might be using ‘hit’ in a negative
sense like depicting an accident. We aim to remove this
limitation.
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Copy Right © INDIACom-2017; ISSN 0973-7529; ISBN 978-93-80544-24-3 6057