<p>When people write a review about a business, they write and rate it based on their personal experience of the business. Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing technique that determines the sentiment of text, including reviews. However, unlike computers, the personal experience of humans emphasizes their preferences and observations that they deem important while ignoring other components that may not be as important to them personally. Traditional sentiment analysis does not consider such preferences. To utilize these human preferences in sentiment analysis, this paper explores various methods of weighting aspects in an attempt to improve sentiment analysis accuracy. Two types of methods are considered. The first method applies human preference by assigning weights to aspects in calculating overall sentiment analysis. The second method uses the results of the first method to improve the accuracy of traditional supervised sentiment analysis. The results show that the methods have high accuracy when people have strong opinions, but the weights of the aspects do not significantly improve the accuracy.</p>

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people have turned to social media to share their experiences with the coronavirus and their feelings regarding subjects like social distancing, mask-wearing, COVID-19 vaccines, and other related topics. The publicly available nature of these social media posts provides researchers the chance to obtain a consensus on an array of issues, topics, people, and entities. For the COVID-19 pandemic, this is valuable information that can prepare communities and governing bodies for future epidemics or events of a similar magnitude. However, clearly defining such a consensus can be difficult, especially if researchers want to limit the amount of bias they introduce. The process of sentiment analysis helps to address this need by categorizing text sources into one of three distinct polarities. Namely, those polarities are often positive, neutral, and negative. While sentiment analysis can take form as a completely manual task, this becomes incredibly burdensome for projects that involve substantial amounts of data. This thesis attempts to overcome this challenge by programmatically classifying the sentiment of COVID-19 posts from 10 social media and web-based forums using a multinomial Naive Bayes classifier. The unique and contrasting qualities of the social networks being analyzed provide a robust take on the public's perception of the pandemic that has not yet been offered up to the present.

By leveraging historical data together with machine learning algorithms, marketers can predict how new campaigns are likely to perform before launch. This approach can save time and resources and can help marketers optimize campaigns in current time through adjustments to increase return on investment (ROI) and reach the right target group. The objective of this thesis is to develop a predictive model through the application of feature selection techniques to assess the likability of a campaign. This study aims to identify the key features that significantly influence campaign likability and to quantify their impact. The task has been approached as a regression problem, with the objective of examine what predictors drives the liking of a campaign. The study implemented four methods for feature selection, recursive feature elimination with cross validation conjucted with random forest, lasso regression, ridge regression and decision trees. Further, to model, the following machine learning algorithms were employed: linear regression, ridge regression with cross validation, lasso regression with cross validation, elastic net with cross validation, kernel ridge regression and support vector regression. Based on the machine learning algorithm and the available data, the results indicate that the set of features generated by recursive feature elimination with cross validation combined with random forest was the most prominent and the algorithm support vector regression generated the best models. / Genom att använda historisk data tillsammans med maskininlärningsalgoritmer kan marknadsförare prediktera hur nya kampanjer sannolikt kommer att prestera innan de lanseras. Denna strategi kan spara tid och resurser och hjälpa marknadsförare att optimera kampanjer i realtid genom justeringar för att öka avkastningen på investeringen och nå rätt målgrupp. Målet med denna avhandling är att utveckla en prediktiv modell genom tillämpning av metodiker för variabelselektion för att bedöma sannolikheten för att en kampanj kommer att vara omtyckt. Denna studie syftar till att identifiera de nyckelvariabler som signifikant påverkar kampanjens popularitet och kvantifiera deras påverkan. Uppgiften behandlas som ett regressionsproblem för att identifiera vilka prediktorer som bidrar till ett positivt helhetsintryck av en kampanj. Studien implementerade fyra metoder för urval av variableselektion: rekursiv variabelselektion med korsvalidering kombinerad med random forest, lasso-regression, ridge-regression och beslutsträd. Dessutom användes följande maskininlärningsalgoritmer för modellering: linjär regression, ridge regression med korsvalidering, lasso regression med korsvalidering, elastiskt nät med korsvalidering, kernel ridge regression och stödvektorsregression. Baserat på maskininlärningsalgoritmerna och det tillgängliga datat indikerar resultaten att uppsättningen av funktioner genererad av rekursiv variabelselektion med korsvalidering kombinerad med random forest var mest framträdande och att algoritmen stödvektorregression genererade de bästa modellerna.

In our study, we conduct a comparative analysis between dictionary-based sentiment analysis and entailment zero-shot text classification for German sentiment analysis. We evaluate the performance of a selection of dictionaries on eleven data sets, including four domain-specific data sets with a focus on historic German language. Our results demonstrate that, in the majority of cases, zero-shot text classification outperforms general-purpose dictionary-based approaches but falls short of the performance achieved by specifically fine-tuned models. Notably, the zero-shot approach exhibits superior performance, particularly in historic German cases, surpassing both general-purpose dictionaries and even a broadly trained sentiment model. These findings indicate that zero-shot text classification holds significant promise as an alternative, reducing the necessity for domain-specific sentiment dictionaries and narrowing the availability gap of off-the-shelf methods for German sentiment analysis. Additionally, we thoroughly discuss the inherent trade-offs associated with the application of these approaches.

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The opinion of customers about companies are very important as this can influence a company’s profit. Companies often get customer feedback via surveys or other official methods in order to improve their services. However, some customers feel threatened when their opinions are publicly asked and thus prefer to voice their opinion on the internet where they take comfort in anonymity. This form of customer feedback is difficult to monitor as the information can be found anywhere on the internet and new information is generated at an astonishing rate. Currently there are companies such as Brandseye and Brand.Com that provide online reputation management services. These services have various shortcomings such as cost and is incapable of accessing historical data. Companies are also not allowed to purchase these software and can only use the software on a subscription basis. The design proposed in this document will be able to scan any number of user defined websites and save all the information found on the websites in a series of index files, which can be queried for occurrences of user defined keywords at any time. Additionally, the software will also be able to scan Twitter and Facebook for any number of user defined keywords and save any occurrences of the keywords to a database. After scanning the internet, the results will be passed through a similarity filter, which will filter out insignificant results as well as any duplicates that might be present. Once passed through the filter the remaining results will be analysed by a sentiment analysis tool which will determine whether the sentence in which the keyword occurs is positive or negative. The analysed results will determine the overall reputation of the keyword that was used. The proposed design has several advantages over current systems: - By using the modular design several tasks can execute at the same time without influencingeach other. For example; information can be extracted from the internet while existing resultsare being analysed. - By providing the keywords and websites that the system will use the user will have full controlover the online reputation management process. - By saving all the information contained in a website the user will be able to take historicalinformation into account to determine how the keywords reputation changes over time. Savingthe information will also allow the user to search for any keyword without rescanning theinternet. The proposed system was tested and successfully used to determine the online reputation of many user defined keywords. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The opinion of customers about companies are very important as this can influence a company’s profit. Companies often get customer feedback via surveys or other official methods in order to improve their services. However, some customers feel threatened when their opinions are publicly asked and thus prefer to voice their opinion on the internet where they take comfort in anonymity. This form of customer feedback is difficult to monitor as the information can be found anywhere on the internet and new information is generated at an astonishing rate. Currently there are companies such as Brandseye and Brand.Com that provide online reputation management services. These services have various shortcomings such as cost and is incapable of accessing historical data. Companies are also not allowed to purchase these software and can only use the software on a subscription basis. The design proposed in this document will be able to scan any number of user defined websites and save all the information found on the websites in a series of index files, which can be queried for occurrences of user defined keywords at any time. Additionally, the software will also be able to scan Twitter and Facebook for any number of user defined keywords and save any occurrences of the keywords to a database. After scanning the internet, the results will be passed through a similarity filter, which will filter out insignificant results as well as any duplicates that might be present. Once passed through the filter the remaining results will be analysed by a sentiment analysis tool which will determine whether the sentence in which the keyword occurs is positive or negative. The analysed results will determine the overall reputation of the keyword that was used. The proposed design has several advantages over current systems: - By using the modular design several tasks can execute at the same time without influencingeach other. For example; information can be extracted from the internet while existing resultsare being analysed. - By providing the keywords and websites that the system will use the user will have full controlover the online reputation management process. - By saving all the information contained in a website the user will be able to take historicalinformation into account to determine how the keywords reputation changes over time. Savingthe information will also allow the user to search for any keyword without rescanning theinternet. The proposed system was tested and successfully used to determine the online reputation of many user defined keywords. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Analyse du sentiment d’appartenance et de l’identité des citoyens des territoires non indépendants de la Caraïbe faisant partie de l’Union européenne. Vérification faite par l’étude des politiques publiques, de l’économie, du filet social, des reliquats de l’esclavage et de la culture dans chacun des territoires étudiés.