Monitoring Public Opinion by Measuring the Sentiment of Retweets on Twitter

Twitter is a popular social networking and micro-blogging site. Twitter data is currently being analyzed by many researchers to get timely and accurate information of users' opinions from their tweets (and retweets). Twitter data can be used to monitor public opinion on matters of interest to governments, organizations, companies, etc. In this paper, we present a novel tool that has been developed to collect and analyze tweets (and retweets) regarding specific topic threads (based on filtering of hashtags). Sentiment analysis of the collected tweets (and retweets) are being performed to categorize tweets as being either positive (or endorsing), neutral, or negative (or opposing) towards the given thread. A case study from Pakistan (the "Zarb-e-Azb" Pakistan armed forces operation against militant groups) has been used to demonstrate the capabilities of the tool.