Abstract & Overview
Twitter is one among most popular micro blogging services with millions of active users. It is a hub of massive collection of data arriving from various sources. In Twitter, users most often express their views, opinions, thoughts, emotions or feelings about a particular topic, product or service, of their interest, choice or concern. This makes twitter a hub of gargantuan amount of data, and at the same time a useful platform in getting to know and understand the underlying sentiment behind a particular product or for that matter anything expressed in twitter as tweets. It is important to note here that aforesaid massive collection of data is not just any redundant data, but one which contains useful information as noted earlier. In view of aforesaid context, Sentiment analysis in relation to twitter data gains enormous importance. Sentiment analysis offers itself as a good approach in classifying the opinions formulated by individuals (tweeters) into different sentiments such as, positive, negative, or neutral. Implementing Sentiment analysis algorithms using conventional tools leads to high computation time, and thus are less effective. Hence, there is a need for state-of-the-art tools and techniques to be developed for sentiment analysis making it the need of the hour to facilitate faster computation. An Apache Hadoop framework is one such option that supports distributed data computing and has been commonly adopted for a variety of use-cases. In this article, the author identifies factors affecting the performance of sentiment analysis algorithms based on Hadoop framework and proposes an approach for optimizing the performance of sentiment analysis. The experimental results depict the potential of the proposed approach.