A taxonomy for sentiment analysis field

Abstract

Purpose

Due to the large and fast growing sentiment analysis (SA) area recently, many new concepts and different nomenclatures have emerged without the desired organization. This confusion in the research field makes the understandability of the concepts hard and also hampers the comparison of different approaches. Thus, this paper aims to propose a hierarchical taxonomy to help the consolidation of SA area. The taxonomy aims at covering the addressed problems and methods in the SA field.

Design/methodology/approach

This taxonomy is a filtered union of various classifications found in the literature with a proposal of nomenclatures standardization. As instance, a case study is presented with 20 SA-related articles classified according to the proposed taxonomy.

Findings

This taxonomy is very expressive because it covers many concepts and is also effective once it allows the distinction and categorization of the previous SA works.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the literature does not present such an expressive and effective classification as proposed in this paper. This new taxonomy allows for the navigation between the existing concepts in the SA field as well as, facilitates the search, comparison and indexing of papers already published.

Citation

Rodrigues, R., Camilo-Junior, C.G. and Rosa, T. (2018), "A taxonomy for sentiment analysis field", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 193-211. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-07-2017-0048