Sentiment Analysis for Smart Cities: State of the Art and Opportunities

Advances of information and communications technologies in general and of social media platforms in particular have changed the way people communicate and express themselves. Citizens are now using smartphones and other mobile devices to share, on an unprecedented scale, their experiences and views in blogs, micro-blogs, comments, photos, videos, and other postings in social sites. The smart city research community has already recognized that sentiment analysis can contribute to a better understanding of, and timely reactions to, public’s needs and concerns by city governments. Yet, relatively little is known about how to best harness the potential benefits for smart cities of opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The objective of this article is to help fill the void by reviewing the state of the art, challenges and opportunities of sentiment analysis platforms, architectures and applications for the smart city application domain.