Over a Decade of Social Opinion Mining: A Systematic Review Keith Cortis ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland
[email protected] Brian Davis ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland
[email protected] Abstract Social media popularity and importance is on the increase due to people using it for various types of social interaction across multiple channels. This sys- tematic review focuses on the evolving research area of Social Opinion Mining, tasked with the identification of multiple opinion dimensions, such as subjectiv- ity, sentiment polarity, emotion, affect, sarcasm and irony, from user-generated content represented across multiple social media platforms and in various media formats, like text, image, video and audio. Through Social Opinion Mining, nat- ural language can be understood in terms of the different opinion dimensions, as expressed by humans. This contributes towards the evolution of Artificial In- arXiv:2012.03091v2 [cs.CL] 6 Jul 2021 telligence which in turn helps the advancement of several real-world use cases, such as customer service and decision making. A thorough systematic review was carried out on Social Opinion Mining research which totals 485 published studies and spans a period of twelve years between 2007 and 2018. The in-depth analysis focuses on the social media platforms, techniques, social datasets, lan- guage, modality, tools and technologies, and other aspects derived. Social Opin- ion Mining can be utilised in many application areas, ranging from marketing, Preprint submitted to Artificial Intelligence Review July 8, 2021 advertising and sales for product/service management, and in multiple domains and industries, such as politics, technology, finance, healthcare, sports and gov- ernment.