14 - Conclusion

Summary

This book introduced the field of sentiment analysis or opinion mining. It presented some basic knowledge and mature techniques in detail and surveyed numerous other state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques. Owing to numerous challenging research problems and a wide variety of practical applications, sentiment analysis has been a very active research area in several computer science fields, including NLP, data mining, web mining, and information retrieval. It has also spread to management science (Hu et al., 2006; Archak et al., 2007; Das and Chen, 2007; Dellarocas et al., 2007; Ghose et al., 2007; Park et al., 2007; Chen and Xie, 2008) and other social science fields such as communications and political science because of its importance to business and society as a whole. With the rapid expansion of social media on the web, the importance of sentiment analysis is also growing by the day.