Overview and Future Opportunities of Sentiment Analysis Approaches for Big Data

The ability to exploit public sentiment in social media is increasingly considered as an important tool for market understanding, customer segmentation and stock price prediction for strategic marketing planning and manoeuvring. This evolution of technology adoption is energised by the healthy growth in big data framework, which caused applications based on Sentiment Analysis (SA) in big data to become common for businesses. However, scarce works have studied the gaps of SA application in big data. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) this study reviews the state of the art of SA approaches. including sentiment polarity detection, SA features (explicit and implicit), sentiment classification techniques and applications of SA and (ii) this study reviews the suitability of SA approaches for application in the big data frameworks, as well as highlights the gaps and suggests future works that should be explored. SA studies are predicted to be expanded into approaches that utilise scalability, possess high adaptability for source variation, velocity and veracity to maximise value mining for the benefit of the users.