Temporal Sentiment Analysis of Socially Important Locations of Social Media Users

Socially important locations are the places which are frequently visited by social media users. Temporal sentiment analysis of socially important locations is the process of interpretation and classification of emotions within their sharings in their socially important locations over time. Observing the temporal sentiment changes in these locations helps both to examine the emotion change in the locations and to understand the thoughts of the social media users in these locations. In this paper, Twitter is selected as social media data source and temporal sentiment analysis of socially important locations of social media users are analyzed in different time frames. For the analysis, a method, called Temporal Sentiment Analysis of Socially Important Locations (TS-SIL), is proposed in this study. In this method, first of all, socially important locations are discovered from the collected Twitter dataset. Then, sentiment analysis is performed using a dictionary based approach and several machine learning algorithms. Finally, the sharings in the locations are listed and the sentiments at these locations are analyzed by daily, weekly, and monthly basis. As a result, socially important locations of the city of Istanbul are discovered and temporal sentiment analysis of these locations are performed. Results shows that all of the socially important locations of Istanbul, except Besiktas Fish Market, showed emotional fluctuations over the time.