Opinion mining in Twitter: How to make use of sarcasm to enhance sentiment analysis

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis refer to the identification and the aggregation of attitudes or opinions expressed by internet users towards a specific topic. However, due to the limitation in terms of characters (i.e. 140 characters per tweet) and the use of informal language, the state-of-the-art approaches of sentiment analysis present lower performances in Twitter than that when they are applied on longer texts. Moreover, presence of sarcasm makes the task even more challenging. Sarcasm is when a person conveys implicit information, usually the opposite of what is said, within the message he transmits. In this paper we propose a method that makes use of a minimal set of features, yet, efficiently classifies tweets regardless of their topic. We also study the importance of detecting sarcastic tweets automatically, and demonstrate how the accuracy of sentiment analysis can be enhanced knowing which tweets are sarcastic and which are not.