Sentiment analysis on microblog utilizing appraisal theory

People and companies selling goods or providing services have always desired to know what people think about their products. The number of opinions on the Web has significantly increased with the emergence of microblogs. In this paper we present a novel method for sentiment analysis of a text that allows the recognition of opinions in microblogs which are connected to a particular target or an entity. This method differs from other approaches in utilizing appraisal theory, which we employ for the analysis of microblog posts. The results of the experiments we performed on Twitter showed that our method improves sentiment classification and is feasible even for such specific content as presented on microblogs.