A Space-Time Framework for Sentiment Scope Analysis in Social Media

• Published in: Big data and cognitive computing 2022-12, Vol.6 (4), p.130
• Main Authors: Bonifazi, Gianluca, Cauteruccio, Francesco, Corradini, Enrico, Marchetti, Michele, Sciarretta, Luigi, Ursino, Domenico, Virgili, Luca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Advertising campaigns; Dictionaries; Dimensional analysis; Information sources; Network analysis; Reddit; sentiment analysis; Social media; Social network analysis; Social networks; spatial scope; temporal scope
• ISSN: 2504-2289; 2504-2289
• DOI: 10.3390/bdcc6040130

The concept of scope was introduced in Social Network Analysis to assess the authoritativeness and convincing ability of a user toward other users on one or more social platforms. It has been studied in the past in some specific contexts, for example to assess the ability of a user to spread information on Twitter. In this paper, we propose a new investigation on scope, as we want to assess the scope of the sentiment of a user on a topic. We also propose a multi-dimensional definition of scope. In fact, besides the traditional spatial scope, we introduce the temporal one, which has never been addressed in the literature, and propose a model that allows the concept of scope to be extended to further dimensions in the future. Furthermore, we propose an approach and a related set of parameters for measuring the scope of the sentiment of a user on a topic in a social network. Finally, we illustrate the results of an experimental campaign we conducted to evaluate the proposed framework on a dataset derived from Reddit. The main novelties of this paper are: (i) a multi-dimensional view of scope; (ii) the introduction of the concept of sentiment scope; (iii) the definition of a general framework capable of analyzing the sentiment scope related to any subject on any social network.