An Approach to Sentiment Analysis -the Case of Airline Quality Rating

Sentiment mining has been commonly associated with the analysis of a text string to determine whether a corpus is of a negative or positive opinion. Recently, sentiment mining has been extended to address problems such as distinguishing objective from subjective propositions, and determining the sources and topics of different opinions expressed in textual data sets such as web blogs, tweets, message board reviews, and news. Companies can leverage opinion polarity and sentiment topic recognition to gain a deeper understanding of the drivers and the overall scope of sentiments. These insights can advance competitive intelligence, improve customer service, attain better brand image, and enhance competitiveness. This research paper proposes a sentiment mining approach which detects sentiment polarity and sentiment topic from text. The approach includes a sentiment topic recognition model that is based on Correlated Topics Models (CTM) with Variational Expectation-Maximization (VEM) algorithm. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of this model using airline data from Twitter. We also examine the reputation of three major airlines by computing their Airline Quality Rating (AQR) based on the output from our approach.