A spatiotemporal approach for social media sentiment analysis

The rapid growth of user-generated unstructured data through social media has raised several challenges and research opportunities. These data constitute a rich source of information for sentiment analysis and help the understanding of spontaneously expressed opinions. In the past few years, many scientific proposals have addressed sentiment analysis issues. However, most of them do not take into account both spatial and temporal dimensions, which would enable a more accurate analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this approach has not received much attention in the literature. In this article, we formalized a spatiotemporal sentiment analysis technique and applied this technique to a case study of tweets about the FIFA 2014 World Cup. Our approach exploits the summarization of sentiment analysis using the spatial and temporal dimensions and automatically generates opinion change flow maps through both dimensions. The results enable the tracking of opinion change flow maps through spatial and temporal analysis.