Quantifying Opinion Strength: A Neutrosophic Inference System for Smart Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Network

Abstract

The contemporary speed at which opinions move on social media makes them an undeniable force in the field of opinion mining (OM). This may cause the OM challenge to become more social than technical. This is when the process can determinately represent everyone to the degree they are worth. Nevertheless, considering perspectivism can result in opinion dynamicity. Pondering the existence of opinion dynamicity and uncertainty can provide smart OM on social media. This study proposes a neutrosophic-based OM approach for Twitter that handles perspectivism, its consequences, and indeterminacy. For perspectivism, a social network analysis (SNA) was conducted using popular SNA tools (e.g., Graphistry). An influence weighting of users was performed using an artificial neural network (ANN) based on the SNA provided output and people’s reactions to the OM analyzed texts. The initiative adoption of neutrosophic logic (NL) to integrate users’ influence with their OM scores is to deal with both the opinion dynamicity and indeterminacy. Thus, it provides new uncertainty OM scores that can reflect everyone. The OM scores needed for integration were generated using TextBlob. The results show the ability of NL to improve the OM process and accurately consider the innumerable degrees. This will eventually aid in a better understanding of people’s opinions, helping OM in social media to become a real pillar of many applications, especially business marketing.