The Evolution of Sentiment Analysis - A Review of Research Topics, Venues, and Top Cited Papers

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of sentiment analysis research, highlighting its historical roots, publication venues, key papers, and recent shifts towards social media and diverse application areas.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, computer-assisted literature review of nearly 7,000 papers, mapping research topics, venues, and citation patterns in sentiment analysis.

Findings

Sentiment analysis research surged after 2004 with web data availability.

Top venues publish only about 30% of total papers.

Research topics have expanded from product reviews to social media and other domains.

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is one of the fastest growing research areas in computer science, making it challenging to keep track of all the activities in the area. We present a computer-assisted literature review, where we utilize both text mining and qualitative coding, and analyze 6,996 papers from Scopus. We find that the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990's. However, the outbreak of computer-based sentiment analysis only occurred with the availability of subjective texts on the Web. Consequently, 99% of the papers have been published after 2004. Sentiment analysis papers are scattered to multiple publication venues, and the combined number of papers in the top-15 venues only represent ca. 30% of the papers in total. We present the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus and a taxonomy of research topics. In recent years, sentiment analysis has shifted from analyzing online product reviews to social media texts from Twitter and Facebook. Many topics beyond product reviews like stock markets, elections, disasters, medicine, software engineering and cyberbullying extend the utilization of sentiment analysis