What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is also known as “opinion mining” and represent the use of natural language processing, text analysis and linguistics, to identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied in private corporations to gauge the public sentiment regarding their products, service or actions. The same is true for the public sector, where local, regional or national governments use it to find out what the general public thinks regarding nuew rules, legislation, etc.

How does it work?

In general, the basis for Sentiment Analysis is Natural Language Processing. But Sentiment Analysis goes further. The basic task of sentiment analysis is classifying the polarity of a given document, social media post, etc., whether the expressed opinion is positive, negative, or neutral. Advanced Sentiment Analysis can even detect emotions like enjoyment, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise. Although usually in the public sector the analytics adhere to the positive/negative/neutral states. Neutral, despite not contributing to the general sentiment per se, is used to calibrate the amount of sentiment expressions there are in total.

Use Cases in Government application: Impact on the public of measures, laws or actions

One of the most frequently use cases in the public sector is in the political or party realms, where the current government (or the opposition) try to find out how latest legislation or events are impacting in the general public and what they express about it. For example after controversial declarations of a public figure or the promulgation of a new law.

Advantages of implementation: providing tools to correct possible missteps

Only by knowing what the general public thinks about the current issues is it possible for the administration to react approriately to what is happening. Either changing laws or making modifications to the news cycle. Only with the correct information at hand is it possible to make better decisions. This technology is integrated in Intelion.