Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, refers to natural language processing techniques for identifying emotional tones in text data. Key tasks include:

Determining if text expresses positive or negative sentiment
Assessing subjectivity vs objectivity
Categorizing emotions like anger, joy, sadness
Extracting opinions and attitudes
Summarizing public sentiment on topics
Analyzing stance, purpose, and tone

Applications involve social media monitoring, customer support, product/brand monitoring, and gaining insights from unstructured text.

Approaches range from dictionary-based methods to advanced machine learning like deep learning applied to textual data. Challenges include detecting sarcasm, irony, culture-dependent expressions.

Overall, sentiment analysis aims to computationally understand subjective human emotions and opinions conveyed in language. It is a key area in natural language processing.