To read this content please select one of the options below:

Analysing the features of negative sentiment tweets

Ling Zhang (Department of Management, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China)
Wei Dong (Department of Education, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China)
Xiangming Mu (Department of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 25 September 2018

Issue publication date: 5 November 2018

834

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to address the challenge of analysing the features of negative sentiment tweets. The method adopted in this paper elucidates the classification of social network documents and paves the way for sentiment analysis of tweets in further research.

Design/methodology/approach

This study classifies negative tweets and analyses their features.

Findings

Through negative tweet content analysis, tweets are divided into ten topics. Many related words and negative words were found. Some indicators of negative word use could reflect the degree to which users release negative emotions: part of speech, the density and frequency of negative words and negative word distribution. Furthermore, the distribution of negative words obeys Zipf’s law.

Research limitations/implications

This study manually analysed only a small sample of negative tweets.

Practical implications

The research explored how many categories of negative sentiment tweets there are on Twitter. Related words are helpful to construct an ontology of tweets, which helps people with information retrieval in a fixed research area. The analysis of extracted negative words determined the features of negative tweets, which is useful to detect the polarity of tweets by machine learning method.

Originality/value

The research provides an initial exploration of a negative document classification method and classifies the negative tweets into ten topics. By analysing the features of negative tweets, related words, negative words, the density of negative words, etc. are presented. This work is the first step to extend Plutchik’s emotion wheel theory into social media data analysis by constructing filed specific thesauri, referred to as local sentimental thesauri.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The research was sponsored in part by the National Social Science Fund Project “Study on dynamic optimisation mechanism of information diffusion in social networks”, Agreement Number 15CTQ029.

Citation

Zhang, L., Dong, W. and Mu, X. (2018), "Analysing the features of negative sentiment tweets", The Electronic Library, Vol. 36 No. 5, pp. 782-799. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-05-2017-0120

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

Related articles