TOM: Twitter opinion mining framework using hybrid classification scheme

Twitter has become one of the most popular micro-blogging platform recently. Millions of users can share their thoughts and opinions about different aspects and events on the micro-blogging platform. Therefore, Twitter is considered as a rich source of information for decision making and sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis refers to a classification problem where the main focus is to predict the polarity of words and then classify them into positive and negative feelings with the aim of identifying attitude and opinions that are expressed in any form or language. Sentiment analysis over Twitter offers organisations a fast and effective way to monitor the publics' feelings towards their brand, business, directors, etc. A wide range of features and methods for training sentiment classifiers for Twitter datasets have been researched in recent years with varying results. The primary issues in previous techniques are classification accuracy, data sparsity and sarcasm, as they incorrectly classify most of the tweets with a very high percentage of tweets incorrectly classified as neutral. This research paper focuses on these problems and presents an algorithm for twitter feeds classification based on a hybrid approach. The proposed method includes various pre-processing steps before feeding the text to the classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed technique overcomes the previous limitations and achieves higher accuracy when compared to similar techniques. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.