General purpose Twitter sentiment analysis is a novel field that is closely related to traditional Twitter sentiment analysis but slightly differs in some key aspects. The main difference lies in the fact that the novel approach considers the unfiltered public Twitter stream while most of the previous approaches often applied various filtering steps which are not feasible for many applications. Another goal is to yield more reliable results by only classifying a tweet as positive or negative if it distinctly consists of the respective sentiment and mark the remaining messages as uncertain. Traditional approaches are often not that strict. Within the course of this thesis it could be verified that the novel approach differs significantly from the traditional approach. Moreover, the experimental results indicated that the archetypical approaches could be transferred to the new domain but the related domain data is consistently sub par when compared to high quality in-domain data. Finally, the viability of the best classification algorithm could be qualitatively verified in a real-world setting that was also developed within the course of this thesis.

Background: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, etc. act as the major sources of information exchange in today's world. The tweets on Twitter are mainly based on the public opinion on a product, event or topic and thus contains large volumes of unprocessed data. Synthesis and Analysis of this data is very important and difficult due to the size of the dataset. Sentiment analysis is chosen as the apt method to analyse this data as this method does not go through all the tweets but rather relates to the sentiments of these tweets in terms of positive, negative and neutral opinions. Sentiment Analysis is normally performed in 3 ways namely Machine learning-based approach, Sentiment lexicon-based approach, and Hybrid approach. The Machine learning based approach uses machine learning algorithms and deep learning algorithms for analysing the data, whereas the sentiment lexicon-based approach uses lexicons in analysing the data and they contain vocabulary of positive and negative words. The Hybrid approach uses a combination of both Machine learning and sentiment lexicon approach for classification. Objectives: The primary objectives of this research are: To identify the algorithms and metrics for evaluating the performance of Machine Learning Classifiers. To compare the metrics from the identified algorithms depending on the size of the dataset that affects the performance of the best-suited algorithm for sentiment analysis. Method: The method chosen to address the research questions is Experiment. Through which the identified algorithms are evaluated with the selected metrics. Results: The identified machine learning algorithms are Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, XGBoost and the deep learning algorithm is CNN-LSTM. The algorithms are evaluated with respect to the metrics namely precision, accuracy, F1 score, recall and compared. CNN-LSTM model is best suited for sentiment analysis on twitter data with respect to the selected size of the dataset. Conclusion: Through the analysis of results, the aim of this research is achieved in identifying the best-suited algorithm for sentiment analysis on twitter data with respect to the selected dataset. CNN-LSTM model results in having the highest accuracy of 88% among the selected algorithms for the sentiment analysis of Twitter data with respect to the selected dataset.

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Twitter är en av de populäraste mikrobloggarna, som används för att uttryckatankar och åsikter om olika ämnen. Ett område som har dragit till sig mycketintresse under de senaste åren är twittersentimentanalys. Twittersentimentanalyshandlar om att bedöma vad för sentiment ett inlägg på Twitter uttrycker, om detuttrycker någonting positivt eller negativt. Olika metoder kan användas för attutföra twittersentimentanalys, där vissa lämpar sig bättre än andra. De vanligastemetoderna för twittersentimentanalys använder maskininlärning.Syftet med denna studie är att utvärdera tre stycken klassificeringsalgoritmerinom maskininlärning och hur märkningen av en datamängd påverkar en klassifi-ceringsmodells förmåga att märka ett twitterinlägg korrekt för twittersentimenta-nalys. Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine och Convolutional Neural Network ärklassificeringsalgoritmerna som har utvärderats. För varje klassificeringsalgoritmhar två klassificeringsmodeller tagits fram, som har tränats och testats på två se-parata datamängder: Stanford Twitter Sentiment och SemEval. Det som skiljer detvå datamängderna åt, utöver innehållet i twitterinläggen, är märkningsmetodenoch mängden twitterinlägg. Utvärderingen har gjorts utefter vilken prestanda deframtagna klassificeringmodellerna uppnår på respektive datamängd, hur lång tidde tar att träna och hur invecklade de var att implementera.Resultaten av studien visar att samtliga modeller som tränades och testades påSemEval uppnådde en högre prestanda än de som tränades och testades på Stan-ford Twitter Sentiment. Klassificeringsmodellerna som var framtagna med Convo-lutional Neural Network uppnådde bäst resultat över båda datamängderna. Dockär ett Convolutional Neural Network mer invecklad att implementera och tränings-tiden är betydligt längre än Naive Bayes och Support Vector Machine. / Twitter is one of the most popular microblogs, which is used to express thoughtsand opinions on different topics. An area that has attracted much interest in recentyears is Twitter sentiment analysis. Twitter sentiment analysis is about assessingwhat sentiment a Twitter post expresses, whether it expresses something positiveor negative. Different methods can be used to perform Twitter sentiment analysis.The most common methods of Twitter sentiment analysis use machine learning.The purpose of this study is to evaluate three classification algorithms in ma-chine learning and how the labeling of a data set affects classification models abilityto classify a Twitter post correctly for Twitter sentiment analysis. Naive Bayes,Support Vector Machine and Convolutional Neural Network are the classificationalgorithms that have been evaluated. For each classification algorithm, two classi-fication models have been trained and tested on two separate data sets: StanfordTwitter Sentiment and SemEval. What separates the two data sets, in addition tothe content of the twitter posts, is the labeling method and the amount of twitterposts. The evaluation has been done according to the performance of the classifi-cation models on the respective data sets, training time and how complicated theywere to implement.The results show that all models trained and tested on SemEval achieved ahigher performance than those trained and tested on Stanford Twitter Sentiment.The Convolutional Neural Network models achieved the best results over both datasets. However, a Convolutional Neural Network is more complicated to implementand the training time is significantly longer than Naive Bayes and Support VectorMachine.