Comparing and Combining Sentiment Analysis Methods
Table 6: F-measures for the eight methods.
['[BOLD] Method', '[BOLD] Twitter', '[BOLD] MySpace', '[BOLD] YouTube', '[BOLD] BBC', '[BOLD] Digg', '[BOLD] Runners World']
Overall, we note that the eight methods yielded wide variation in their results across the different datasets. We observe better performance on datasets that contain more expressed sentiment, such as social network messages (e.g., Twitter and MySpace) and lower performance on formal datasets (e.g., BBC and Digg). For instance, on BBC posts (i.e., formal content), the highest F-measure was 0.532, from SentiStrength On the other hand, for the MySpace dataset (i.e., informal content), the highest F-measure was obtained by PANAS-t (0.958) and the average F-measure for all 8 methods was 72%. This might indicate that each method complements the others in different ways.