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1 – 10 of over 1000Alkmini Gkritzali, Eleni Mavragani and Dimitris Gritzalis
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) through twitter on value co-destruction for Athens, as a tourism destination facing a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) through twitter on value co-destruction for Athens, as a tourism destination facing a sustained crisis. The study demonstrates the sentiment and sharing evolution of tweets, illustrating the value co-destruction of a tourism destination. Overall, the study expands understanding on the online footprints of MWOM in the field of tourism.
Design/methodology/approach
It uses social media focused data mining and sentiment analysis, to analyze more than 90,000 tweets posted by top twitter influencers between 2013 and 2015. The methodology that the authors have adopted follows seven steps: first, identification of the top-5 twitter influencers who use the hashtag #Athens, based on their klout score; second, collection of tweets from the top-5 twitter influencers, for the period from January 2013 until June 2015; third, collection of the retweets metadata of the above tweets and of the corresponding retweeter accounts (i.e. user id, name, screen name), together with the frequency of retweeting per tweet; fourth, collection of user metadata (i.e. location and number of followers) from the retweeter accounts; fifth, influence computation of retweetwers using their klout score; sixth, tweets classification based on the klout score of their retweeters; and seventh, sentiment analysis of the collected tweets.
Findings
The findings show the high potential of value co-destruction in virtual environments, through negative MWOM related to tourism destinations in crisis, and shared among highly influencing users, that disseminate negative stories through microblogging. The findings also reveal the existence of negativity bias that can reduce the risks of visiting a new destination facing a crisis and, at the same time, significantly destroy the destination’s value.
Originality/value
This is the first study to examine the impact of MWOM through twitter on a tourism destination facing a sustained crisis, such as Athens. This study uses social media focused data mining and sentiment analysis, to analyze more than 90,000 tweets posted by top twitter influencers between 2013 and 2015. The findings reveal the existence of negativity bias that can reduce the risks of visiting a new destination facing a crisis and, at the same time, significantly destroy the destination’s value.
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Ling Zhang, Wei Dong and Xiangming Mu
This paper aims to address the challenge of analysing the features of negative sentiment tweets. The method adopted in this paper elucidates the classification of social network…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to address the challenge of analysing the features of negative sentiment tweets. The method adopted in this paper elucidates the classification of social network documents and paves the way for sentiment analysis of tweets in further research.
Design/methodology/approach
This study classifies negative tweets and analyses their features.
Findings
Through negative tweet content analysis, tweets are divided into ten topics. Many related words and negative words were found. Some indicators of negative word use could reflect the degree to which users release negative emotions: part of speech, the density and frequency of negative words and negative word distribution. Furthermore, the distribution of negative words obeys Zipf’s law.
Research limitations/implications
This study manually analysed only a small sample of negative tweets.
Practical implications
The research explored how many categories of negative sentiment tweets there are on Twitter. Related words are helpful to construct an ontology of tweets, which helps people with information retrieval in a fixed research area. The analysis of extracted negative words determined the features of negative tweets, which is useful to detect the polarity of tweets by machine learning method.
Originality/value
The research provides an initial exploration of a negative document classification method and classifies the negative tweets into ten topics. By analysing the features of negative tweets, related words, negative words, the density of negative words, etc. are presented. This work is the first step to extend Plutchik’s emotion wheel theory into social media data analysis by constructing filed specific thesauri, referred to as local sentimental thesauri.
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Aasif Ahmad Mir, Sevukan Rathinam and Sumeer Gul
Twitter is gaining popularity as a microblogging and social networking service to discuss various social issues. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic…
Abstract
Purpose
Twitter is gaining popularity as a microblogging and social networking service to discuss various social issues. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic and is discussed worldwide. Social media is an instant platform to deliberate various dimensions of COVID-19. The purpose of the study is to explore and analyze the public sentiments related to COVID-19 vaccines across the Twitter messages (positive, neutral, and negative) and the impact tweets make across digital social circles.
Design/methodology/approach
To fetch the vaccine-related posts, a manual examination of randomly selected 500 tweets was carried out to identify the popular hashtags relevant to the vaccine conversation. It was found that the hashtags “covid19vaccine” and “coronavirusvaccine” were the two popular hashtags used to discuss the communications related to COVID-19 vaccines. 23,575 global tweets available in public domain were retrieved through “Twitter Application Programming Interface” (API), using “Orange Software”, an open-source machine learning, data visualization and data mining toolkit. The study was confined to the tweets posted in English language only. The default data cleaning and preprocessing techniques available in the “Orange Software” were applied to the dataset, which include “transformation”, “tokenization” and “filtering”. The “Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning” (VADER) tool was used for classification of tweets to determine the tweet sentiments (positive, neutral and negative) as well as the degree of sentiments (compound score also known as sentiment score). To assess the influence/impact of tweets account wise (verified and unverified) and sentiment wise (positive, neutral, and negative), the retweets and likes, which offer a sort of reward or acknowledgment of tweets, were used.
Findings
A gradual decline in the number of tweets over the time is observed. Majority (11,205; 47.52%) of tweets express positive sentiments, followed by neutral (7,948; 33.71%) and negative sentiments (4,422; 18.75%), respectively. The study also signifies a substantial difference between the impact of tweets tweeted by verified and unverified users. The tweets related to verified users have a higher impact both in terms of retweets (65.91%) and likes (84.62%) compared to the tweets tweeted by unverified users. Tweets expressing positive sentiments have the highest impact both in terms of likes (mean = 10.48) and retweets (mean = 3.07) compared to those that express neutral or negative sentiments.
Research limitations/implications
The main limitation of the study is that the sentiments of the people expressed over one single social platform, that is, Twitter have been studied which cannot generalize the global public perceptions. There can be a variation in the results when the datasets from other social media platforms will be studied.
Practical implications
The study will help to know the people's sentiments and beliefs toward the COVID-19 vaccines. Sentiments that people hold about the COVID-19 vaccines are studied, which will help health policymakers understand the polarity (positive, negative, and neutral) of the tweets and thus see the public reaction and reflect the types of information people are exposed to about vaccines. The study can aid the health sectors to intensify positive messages and eliminate negative messages for an enhanced vaccination uptake. The research can also help design more operative vaccine-advocating communication by customizing messages using the obtained knowledge from the sentiments and opinions about the vaccines.
Originality/value
The paper focuses on an essential aspect of COVID-19 vaccines and how people express themselves (positively, neutrally and negatively) on Twitter.
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Miriam Alzate, Marta Arce Urriza and Monica Cortiñas
This study aims to understand the extent of privacy concerns regarding voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) on Twitter. It investigates three key areas: (1) the effect of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand the extent of privacy concerns regarding voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) on Twitter. It investigates three key areas: (1) the effect of privacy-related press coverage on public sentiment and discussion volume; (2) the comparative negativity of privacy-focused conversations versus general conversations; and (3) the specific privacy-related topics that arise most frequently and their impact on sentiment and discussion volume.
Design/methodology/approach
A dataset of 441,427 tweets mentioning Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2021 were collected. Privacy-related press coverage has also been monitored. Sentiment analysis was conducted using the dictionary-based software LIWC and VADER, whereas text mining packages in R were used to identify privacy-related issues.
Findings
Negative privacy-related news significantly increases both negativity and volume in Twitter conversations, whereas positive news only boosts volume. Privacy-related tweets were notably more negative than general tweets. Specific keywords were found to either increase or decrease the sentiment and discussion volume. Additionally, a temporal evolution in sentiment, with general attitudes toward VAPAs becoming more positive, but privacy-specific discussions becoming more negative was observed.
Originality/value
This research augments the existing online privacy literature by employing text mining methodologies to gauge consumer sentiments regarding privacy concerns linked to VAPAs, a topic currently underexplored. Furthermore, this research uniquely integrates established theories from privacy calculus and social contract theory to deepen our analysis.
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Fotis Misopoulos, Miljana Mitic, Alexandros Kapoulas and Christos Karapiperis
In this paper the authors present a study that uses Twitter to identify critical elements of customer service in the airline industry. The goal of the study was to uncover…
Abstract
Purpose
In this paper the authors present a study that uses Twitter to identify critical elements of customer service in the airline industry. The goal of the study was to uncover customer opinions about services by monitoring and analyzing public Twitter commentaries. The purpose of this paper is to identify elements of customer service that provide positive experiences to customers as well as to identify service processed and features that require further improvements.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors employed the approach of sentiment analysis as part of the netnography study. The authors processed 67,953 publicly shared tweets to identify customer sentiments about services of four airline companies. Sentiment analysis was conducted using the lexicon approach and vector-space model for assessing the polarity of Twitter posts.
Findings
By analyzing Twitter posts for their sentiment polarity the authors were able to identify areas of customer service that caused customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction as well as delight. Positive sentiments were linked mostly to online and mobile check-in services, favorable prices, and flight experiences. Negative sentiments revealed problems with usability of companies’ web sites, flight delays and lost luggage. Evidence of delightful experiences was recorded among services provided in airport lounges.
Originality/value
Paper demonstrates how sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds can be used in research on customer service experiences, as an alternative to Kano and SERVQUAL models.
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Shrawan Kumar Trivedi and Amrinder Singh
There is a strong need for companies to monitor customer-generated content of social media, not only about themselves but also about competitors, to deal with competition and to…
Abstract
Purpose
There is a strong need for companies to monitor customer-generated content of social media, not only about themselves but also about competitors, to deal with competition and to assess competitive environment of the business. The purpose of this paper is to help companies with social media competitive analysis and transformation of social media data into knowledge creation for decision-makers, specifically for app-based food delivery companies.
Design/methodology/approach
Three online app-based food delivery companies, i.e. Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats, were considered in this study. Twitter was used as the data collection platform where customer’s tweets related to all three companies are fetched using R-Studio and Lexicon-based sentiment analysis method is applied on the tweets fetched for the companies. A descriptive analytical method is used to compute the score of different sentiments. A negative and positive sentiment word list is created to match the word present on the tweets and based on the matching positive, negative and neutral sentiments score are decided. The sentiment analysis is a best method to analyze consumer’s text sentiment. Lexicon-based sentiment classification is always preferable than machine learning or other model because it gives flexibility to make your own sentiment dictionary to classify emotions. To perform tweets sentiment analysis, lexicon-based classification method and text mining were performed on R-Studio platform.
Findings
Results suggest that Zomato (26% positive sentiments) has received more positive sentiments as compared to the other two companies (25% positive sentiments for Swiggy and 24% positive sentiments for UberEats). Negative sentiments for the Zomato was also low (12% negative sentiments) compared to Swiggy and UberEats (13% negative sentiments for both). Further, based on negative sentiments concerning all the three food delivery companies, tweets were analyzed and recommendations for business provided.
Research limitations/implications
The results of this study reveal the value of social media competitive analysis and show the power of text mining and sentiment analysis in extracting business value and competitive advantage. Suggestions, business and research implications are also provided to help companies in developing a social media competitive analysis strategy.
Originality/value
Twitter analysis of food-based companies has been performed.
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Rahat Gulzar, Sumeer Gul, Manoj Kumar Verma, Mushtaq Ahmad Darzi, Farzana Gulzar and Sheikh Shueb
Sharing and obtaining information over social media has enabled people to express their opinions regarding any event. Since the tweets regarding the Russia-Ukraine war were…
Abstract
Purpose
Sharing and obtaining information over social media has enabled people to express their opinions regarding any event. Since the tweets regarding the Russia-Ukraine war were extensively publicized on social media, this study aims to analyse the temporal sentiments people express through tweets related to the war.
Design/methodology/approach
Relevant hashtag related to the Russia-Ukraine war was identified, and tweets were downloaded using Twitter API, which were later migrated to Orange Data mining software. Pre-processing techniques like transformation, tokenization, and filtering were applied to the extracted tweets. VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning) sentiment analysis module of Orange software was used to categorize tweets into positive, negative and neutral ones based on the tweet polarity. For ascertaining the key and co-occurring terms and phrases in tweets and also to visualize the keyword clusters, VOSviewer, a data visualization software, was made use of.
Findings
An increase in the number of tweets is witnessed in the initial days, while a decline is observed over time. Most tweets are negative in nature, followed by positive and neutral ones. It is also ascertained that tweets from verified accounts are more impactful than unverified ones. russiaukrainewar, ukraine, russia, false, war, nato, zelensky and stoprussia are the dominant co-occurring keywords. Ukraine, Russia and Putin are the top hashtags for sentiment representation. India, the USA and the UK contribute the highest tweets.
Originality/value
The study tries to explore the public sentiments expressed over Twitter related to Russia-Ukraine war.
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Collins Udanor and Chinatu C. Anyanwu
Hate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media…
Abstract
Purpose
Hate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media provides a breeding ground for hate speech and makes combating it seems like a lost battle. However, what may constitute a hate speech in a cultural or religious neutral society may not be perceived as such in a polarized multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Defining hate speech, therefore, may be contextual. Hate speech in Nigeria may be perceived along ethnic, religious and political boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to check for the presence of hate speech in social media platforms like Twitter, and to what degree is hate speech permissible, if available? It also intends to find out what monitoring mechanisms the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put in place to combat hate speech. Lexalytics is a term coined by the authors from the words lexical analytics for the purpose of opinion mining unstructured texts like tweets.
Design/methodology/approach
This research developed a Python software called polarized opinions sentiment analyzer (POSA), adopting an ego social network analytics technique in which an individual’s behavior is mined and described. POSA uses a customized Python N-Gram dictionary of local context-based terms that may be considered as hate terms. It then applied the Twitter API to stream tweets from popular and trending Nigerian Twitter handles in politics, ethnicity, religion, social activism, racism, etc., and filtered the tweets against the custom dictionary using unsupervised classification of the texts as either positive or negative sentiments. The outcome is visualized using tables, pie charts and word clouds. A similar implementation was also carried out using R-Studio codes and both results are compared and a t-test was applied to determine if there was a significant difference in the results. The research methodology can be classified as both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative in terms of data classification, and quantitative in terms of being able to identify the results as either negative or positive from the computation of text to vector.
Findings
The findings from two sets of experiments on POSA and R are as follows: in the first experiment, the POSA software found that the Twitter handles analyzed contained between 33 and 55 percent hate contents, while the R results show hate contents ranging from 38 to 62 percent. Performing a t-test on both positive and negative scores for both POSA and R-studio, results reveal p-values of 0.389 and 0.289, respectively, on an α value of 0.05, implying that there is no significant difference in the results from POSA and R. During the second experiment performed on 11 local handles with 1,207 tweets, the authors deduce as follows: that the percentage of hate contents classified by POSA is 40 percent, while the percentage of hate contents classified by R is 51 percent. That the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by POSA is 87 percent, while free speech is 86 percent. And the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by R is 65 percent, while free speech is 74 percent. This study reveals that neither Twitter nor Facebook has an automated monitoring system for hate speech, and no benchmark is set to decide the level of hate contents allowed in a text. The monitoring is rather done by humans whose assessment is usually subjective and sometimes inconsistent.
Research limitations/implications
This study establishes the fact that hate speech is on the increase on social media. It also shows that hate mongers can actually be pinned down, with the contents of their messages. The POSA system can be used as a plug-in by Twitter to detect and stop hate speech on its platform. The study was limited to public Twitter handles only. N-grams are effective features for word-sense disambiguation, but when using N-grams, the feature vector could take on enormous proportions and in turn increasing sparsity of the feature vectors.
Practical implications
The findings of this study show that if urgent measures are not taken to combat hate speech there could be dare consequences, especially in highly polarized societies that are always heated up along religious and ethnic sentiments. On daily basis tempers are flaring in the social media over comments made by participants. This study has also demonstrated that it is possible to implement a technology that can track and terminate hate speech in a micro-blog like Twitter. This can also be extended to other social media platforms.
Social implications
This study will help to promote a more positive society, ensuring the social media is positively utilized to the benefit of mankind.
Originality/value
The findings can be used by social media companies to monitor user behaviors, and pin hate crimes to specific persons. Governments and law enforcement bodies can also use the POSA application to track down hate peddlers.
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Yasir Mehmood and Vimala Balakrishnan
Research on sentiment analysis were mostly conducted on product and services, resulting in scarcity of studies focusing on social issues, which may require different mechanisms…
Abstract
Purpose
Research on sentiment analysis were mostly conducted on product and services, resulting in scarcity of studies focusing on social issues, which may require different mechanisms due to the nature of the issue itself. This paper aims to address this gap by developing an enhanced lexicon-based approach.
Design/methodology/approach
An enhanced lexicon-based approach was employed using General Inquirer, incorporated with multi-level grammatical dependencies and the role of verb. Data on illegal immigration were gathered from Twitter for a period of three months, resulting in 694,141 tweets. Of these, 2,500 tweets were segregated into two datasets for evaluation purposes after filtering and pre-processing.
Findings
The enhanced approach outperformed ten online sentiment analysis tools with an overall accuracy of 81.4 and 82.3% for dataset 1 and 2, respectively as opposed to ten other sentiment analysis tools.
Originality/value
The study is novel in the sense that data pertaining to a social issue were used instead of products and services, which require different mechanism due to the nature of the issue itself.
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Laura Illia, Elanor Colleoni and Katia Meggiorin
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore under which conditions Tweets of infomediaries (i.e. ordinary users having few or no followers on Twitter) might nevertheless…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore under which conditions Tweets of infomediaries (i.e. ordinary users having few or no followers on Twitter) might nevertheless promote a negative sentiment toward a corporation to the point of having a negative impact on the corporation's outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical study is based on a unique database that combines a sample of one year of Twitter conversations about an Italian bank and its daily business performances (i.e. number of closures and openings). The relationship between these two is analyzed using autoregressive time series models (VAR).
Findings
Findings indicate that a tweet affects a bank’s outcomes only when embedded in a larger conversation about the bank, rather than simply repetitively shared. These findings contribute to two debates within bank marketing literature. First is the debate about the role of infomediaries in banks' outcomes, as it urges to reconsider the way banks' online reputation is conceptualized and measured. Second is the debate on opportunities and threats of social media for the banking industry, as it indicates that negative sentiment expressed by the general public influences not only stock markets but also directly banks' outcomes.
Originality/value
This study allows managers and corporations to understand what to do when conversations of unknown individuals become threatening for the company. To influence such situations, the company should identify not only the actors that are influencers but also the communications that have been popular in the past for their brand or the brand of their competitors and monitor the conversational volume and broadness.
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