Empirical study of sentiment analysis tools and techniques on societal topics

Abstract

A surge in public opinions mining against various societal topics using publicly available off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools is evident in recent times. Since sentiment analysis is a domain-dependent problem, and the majority of the tools are built for customer reviews, the suitability of using such existing off-the-the-shelf tools for a societal topic is subject to investigation. None of the existing studies has thoroughly investigated on societal issues. This paper systematically evaluates the performance of 10 popularly used off-the-shelf tools and 17 state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and investigates their strengths and weaknesses using various societal and non-societal topics.