How Are We Doing? Opinion Mining Customer Sentiment in US Transit Agencies and Airlines via Twitter

This manuscript examines the unsolicited comments on the social media site Twitter using a simple opinion mining method. The data are scored using a commonly available, experimentally tested lexicon of words associated with both positive and negative experiences. Analysis of the scoring performance finds that even though the analysis uses a simple algorithm, the algorithm performs fairly well in clustering similar services, recognizing non-opinions, and marking both strongly positive and strongly negative assessments. Among transit agencies, Translink in Vancouver and TriMet in Portland have the least negative commentary in their feeds. Alaska Airlines and Southwest were the airlines with the most positive comments appearing on Twitter.