Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining for Social Media Microblogs using Open Source Tools: An Empirical Study

Recently, Social media has arisen not only as a personal communication media, but also, as a media to communicate opinions about products and services or even political and general events among its users. Due to its widespread and popularity, there is a massive amount of user reviews or opinions produced and shared daily. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media micro blogging sites. Mining user opinions from social media data is not a straight forward task; it can be accomplished in different ways. In this work, an open source approach is presented, throughout which, twitter Microblogs data has been collected, pre-processed, analyzed and visualized using open source tools to perform text mining and sentiment analysis for analyzing user contributed online reviews about two giant retail stores in the UK namely Tesco and Asda stores over Christmas period 2014. Collecting customer opinions can be expensive and time consuming task using conventional methods such as surveys. The sentiment analysis of the customer opinions makes it easier for businesses to understand their competitive value in a changing market and to understand their customer views about their products and services, which also provide an insight into future marketing strategies and decision making policies