A Study of Sentiment and Trend Analysis Techniques for Social Media Content

The social media networks have evolved rapidly and people frequently use these services to communicate with others and express themselves by sharing opinions, views, ideas etc. on different topics. The social media trend analysis is generally carried out by sifting the corresponding or interlinked events discussed on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. The fundamental objective behind such analyses is to determine the level of criticality with respect to criticism or appreciation described in the comments, tweets or blogs. The trend analysis techniques can also be systematically exploited for opinion making among the masses at large. The results of such analyses show how people think, assess, orate and opine about different issues. This paper primarily focuses on the trend detection and sentiment analysis techniques and their efficacy in the contextual information. We further discuss these techniques which are used to analyze the sentiments expressed within a particular sentence, paragraph or document etc. The analysis based on sentiments can pave way for automatic trend analysis, topic recognition and opinion mining etc. Furthermore, we can fairly estimate the degree of positivity and negativity of the opinions and sentiments based on the content obtained from a particular social media.