Sentiment Identification in Football-Specific Tweets

Sports fans generate a large amount of tweets which reflect their opinions and feelings about what is happening during various sporting events. Given the popularity of football events, in this work, we focus on analyzing sentiment expressed by football fans through Twitter. These tweets reflect the changes in the fans’ sentiment as they watch the game and react to the events of the game, e.g., goal scoring, penalties, and so on. Collecting and examining the sentiment conveyed through these tweets will help to draw a complete picture which expresses fan interaction during a specific football event. The objective of this work is to propose a domain-specific approach for understanding sentiments expressed in football fans’ conversations. To achieve our goal, we start by developing a football-specific sentiment dataset which we label manually. We then utilize our dataset to automatically create a football-specific sentiment lexicon. Finally, we develop a sentiment classifier which is capable of recognizing sentiments expressed in football conversation. We conduct extensive experiments on our dataset to compare the performance of different learning algorithms in identifying the sentiment expressed in football related tweets. Our results show that our approach is effective in recognizing the fans’ sentiment during football events.