(New Book) Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, by Bing Liu

New Book by Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Bing Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago
May 2012

Available for download here:
http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00416ED1V01Y201204HLT016

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments,
evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas
in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In
fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social
sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment
analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs,
micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume
of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis.

Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions
are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and
perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate
the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is
true not only for individuals but also for organizations.

This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest
developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and
practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in
particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social
media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online.