Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study sarcasm in online text – specifically on twitter – to better understand customer opinions about social issues, products, services, etc. This can be immensely helpful in reducing incorrect classification of consumer sentiment toward issues, products and services.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, 5,000 tweets were downloaded and analyzed. Relevant features were extracted and supervised learning algorithms were applied to identify the best differentiating features between a sarcastic and non-sarcastic sentence.
Findings
The results using two different classification algorithms, namely, Naïve Bayes and maximum entropy show that function words and content words together are most effective in identifying sarcasm in tweets. The most differentiating features between a sarcastic and a non-sarcastic tweet were identified.
Practical implications
Understanding the use of sarcasm in tweets let companies do better sentiment analysis and product recommendations for users. This could help businesses attract new customers and retain the old ones resulting in better customer management.
Originality/value
This paper uses novel features to identify sarcasm in online text which is one of the most challenging problems in natural language processing. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on sarcasm detection from a customer management perspective.
Purpose
Colossal information is available in cyberspace from a variety of sources such as blogs, reviews, posts and feedback. The mentioned sources have helped in improving various business processes from product development to stock market development. This paper aims to transform this wealth of information in the online medium to economic wealth. Earlier approaches to investment decision-making are dominated by the analyst's recommendations. However, their credibility has been questioned for herding behavior, conflict of interest and favoring underwriter's firms. This study assumes that members of the online crowd who have been reliable, profitable and knowledgeable in the recent past will continue to be so soon.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors identify credible members as experts using multi-criteria decision-making tools. In this work, an alternative actionable investment strategy is proposed and demonstrated through a mock-up. The experimental prototype is divided into two phases: expert selection and investment.
Findings
The created portfolio is comparable and even profitable than several major global stock indices.
Practical implications
This work aims to benefit individual investors, investment managers and market onlookers.
Originality/value
This paper takes into account factors: the accuracy and trustworthiness of the sources of stock market recommendations. Earlier work in the area has focused solely intelligence of the analyst for the stock recommendation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the combined intelligence of the virtual investment communities has been considered to make stock market recommendations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.