Extracting Opinions from Topic-Based Events in the Blogosphere

With the rapid development of information technologies in recent years, people can now easily publish their opinions on the Internet. On the other hand, people can also obtain various opinions from others in a few seconds even though they do not know each other. A typical approach to obtain required information is to use a search engine with some relevant keywords. Nevertheless, it is a time-consuming process when looking for opinions of other individuals. Usually, the retrieved opinions are not the latest and single-sided. On the other hand, it is noted that people can have their own blog sites as a platform to publish personal thoughts, ideas or comments easily. We thus take the blogosphere as our major data source and aim at discovering opinions efficiently and effectively in this work. Moreover, two crucial issues are carefully addressed in this work. First, the opinion diversity is addressed by providing various opinions from multiple aspects. Second, we conduct sentiment analysis on opinions against some topic-based events in different time spans to address the opinion dynamics. Empirical studies show that the proposed scheme can help users to obtain opinions of some topic-based events in both an efficient and an effective way.