Review on the Application of Lexicon-Based Political Sentiment Analysis in Social Media

Abstract

This chapter presented an analysis of the application of lexicon-based political sentiment analysis in social media. The aim is to identify the most frequently used lexicons in political sentiment analysis, their results, similarities, and differences. For this, the authors conducted a systematic literature review based on PRISMA methodology. Afinn, NRC, and SenticNet lexicons are tested and combined for data analysis from the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. Findings show that political sentiment analysis is a new field studied for only 10 years. Political sentiment analysis could generate benefits in understanding problems such as political polarization, discourse analysis, politician influence, candidate profiling, and improving government-citizen interaction, among other problems in the public sphere, enhanced by the combination of lexicons and multimodal analysis. The authors conclude that polarity was one of the critical dimensions identified for finding variations in the behavior and polarity of sentiments. Limitations and future work also are presented.