Chapter 8. Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

	"He who molds the public sentiment... makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make."
	--Abraham Lincoln.

What people think matters not only to politicians and celebrities but also to most of us social beings. This need to know opinions about ourselves has affected people for a long time and is aptly summarized by the preceding famous quote. The opinion bug not only affects our own outlook, it affects the way we use products and services as well. As discussed while learning about market basket analysis and recommender engines (see Chapter 3, Predicting Customer Shopping Trends with Market Basket Analysis and Chapter 4, Building a Product Recommendation System respectively), our behavior can be approximated or predicted by observing the behavior of a group of people with similar characteristics such as price sensitivity, color preferences, brand loyalty, and so on. We also discussed in the earlier chapters that, for a long time,...