An emotional polarity analysis of consumers’ airline service tweets

Blogs and social networks have recently become a valuable resource for mining sentiments in fields as diverse as customer relationship management, public opinion tracking and text filtering. In fact, the knowledge obtained from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook has been shown to be extremely valuable to marketing research companies, public opinion organizations and other text mining entities. However, Web texts have been classified as noisy as they still pose considerable problems both at the lexical and the syntactic levels. In this research, we used a random sample of 2,105 tweets for sixteen commercial airlines to evaluate consumers’ sentiment towards airline service provided. We used an expert pre-defined lexicon to conduct the analysis. The lexicon includes around 6,800 seed adjectives with known orientation. Our results indicate a generally negative consumer sentiment towards commercial airline services, which suggests that most airline services are sub-optimal. Using both a qualitative and quantitative methodology to analyze airline service tweets, this study adds breadth and depth to the debate over airline service quality.