AN ITERATIVE METHOD OF SENTIMENT ANALYSIS FOR RELIABLE USER EVALUATION

Benefited from the booming social network, reading posts from other users overinternet is becoming one of commonest ways for people to intake information. Onemay also have noticed that sometimes we tend to focus on users provide well-foundedanalysis, rather than those merely who vent their emotions. This thesis aims atfinding a simple and efficient way to recognize reliable information sources amongcountless internet users by examining the sentiments from their past posts.

To achieve this goal, the research utilized a dataset of tweets about Apples stockprice retrieved from Twitter. Key features we studied include post-date, user name,number of followers of that user, and the sentiment of that tweet. Prior to makingfurther use of the dataset, tweets from users who do not have sufficient posts arefiltered out. To compare user sentiments and the derivative of Apples stock price, weuse Pearson correlation between them for to describe how well each user performs.Then we iteratively increase the weight of reliable users and lower the weight ofuntrustworthy users, the correlation between overall sentiment and the derivative ofstock price will finally converge. The final correlations for individual users are theirperformance scores. Due to the chaos of real world data, manual segmentation viadata visualization is also proposed as a denoise method to improve performance.Besides our method, other metrics can also be considered as user trust index, suchas numbers of followers of each user. Experiments are conducted to prove that ourmethod out performs others. With simple input, this method can be applied on awide range of topics including election, economy, and job market.