High Performance Twitter Sentiment Analysis Using CUDA Based Distance Kernel on GPUs

Sentiment analysis techniques are widely used for extracting feelings of users in different domains such as social media content, surveys, and user reviews. This is mostly performed by using classical text classification techniques. One of the major challenges in this field is having a large and sparse feature space that stems from sparse representation of texts. The high dimensionality of the feature space creates a serious problem in terms of time and performance for sentiment analysis. This is particularly important when selected classifier requires intense calculations as in k-NN. To cope with this problem, we used sentiment analysis techniques for Turkish Twitter feeds using the NVIDIA's CUDA technology. We employed our CUDA-based distance kernel implementation for k-NN which is a widely used lazy classifier in this field. We conducted our experiments on four machines with different computing capacities in terms of GPU and CPU configuration to analyze the impact on speed-up.