Intro

HappyTweet is a project for doing sentiment analysis on Twitter data.

Inspiration

The name for the project is inspired by a Steve Martin bit: Happy Feet and I’ve imagined a logo based on the sliding footprint pictures used by Go Feet Records on the back of English Beat records. That’s probably getting a little ahead of the game though.

Research

Interesting articles about Word Vectors are what got this project started in theory but also what prevented it from starting in practice. I was spending a lot of time reading but not actually doing anything. Then, in a pretty short time span, I can across this blog post, Imagining your future projects is holding you back
and an episode of the Giant Robots Podcast titled Always be Hustling where the guest talked about saying ‘do it anyway’ when he didn’t want to do things. Rather than stressing and putting off a task he says ‘F!!! it. Do it anyway’ Accept that it may not be the best or be perfect, but doing it will be better than not doing it.

So, prodded forward by these to items, I started down the path toward something even less than the agile minimum viable product. This is beginning with something I know is not good, but it will provide a base to iterate and improve on.

Iteration 1

The simplest form of analysis that I could think of is to take each word in a Tweet and look up a known sentiment value for that word. Summing up all the words in the Tweet gives an overall score.

Two things are needed to build this version. One is a set of scored Tweets and the other is a list of words with sentiment scores. I found a list tweets at Sentiment140 There is a link to test data that was used in the Sentiment140 research.

The list of words was downloaded from crr.ugent.be where they have collected

affective norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English words

The words are scored from 1 to 9 with 9 being the happiest.

For my algorithm, I like to think of happy as positive and unhappy as negative so, I shifted the scale. Rather than having neutral being at 5 I subtract 5 to make neutral 0.

As expected, it didn’t perform very well. Only 46% of the tweets were scored correctly.

What’s Next

First, I’d like to look at ways to increase the number of words that affect the score. I’m thinking about finding a library that calculates lemmas so that simple variations of words can be converted into the standard form that has been scored. Another approach to that same problem is to use word vectors to find similar words that are scored.