Monday, September 23, 2013

Dhoni's new mohawk hairstyle: what is the mood on Twitter?

This article on Firstpost.com claims "Dhoni’s new bald buzz hawk stirs Twitter but fails to impress".
Though the article doesn't detail the methodology used, sentiment(mood) analysis for a trending topic on social network in itself is a "trending" topic. It can be defined as the method to gauge public opinion on topics of interest(an event, a brand, a personality...) by analyzing posts related to the topic from popular social networks (Twitter, Facebook etc.). Sentiment analysis combines Big Data, Statistics, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and other related fields from computer science to sense the mood of the posts. This is easier said then done because computers are good at understanding well defined instructions but exceptionally bad at understanding unstructured data like posts which neither have a fixed format nor a consistent meaning.

Enough with the introduction, so I used a sentiment analysis tool designed by Stanford students (who else?) at http://www.sentiment140.com to gauge the sentiment on Twitter about Dhoni's new hairstyle on 23rd September, a day after he sported the look for the first time. The tool picks up the most recent posts on Twitter related to Dhoni for sentiment analysis. Here is the result:

twitter sentiment analysis

So, is Firstpost correct in it's conclusion? You decide!

Some of the twitter posts on the basis of which http://www.sentiment140.com calculated the sentiment:

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