1. Was the message positive, negative or neutral in reference to the brand?
2. If it was negative, was it due to customer service, taste, health or some other reason?

The work was entertaining for the participants, they completed tasks efficiently and the results seem to be very accurate.

About sentiment analysis

With the growing use of online services like Twitter, blogs and forums, there is a vast amount of publicly available information generated by everyday people about millions of different topics (companies, products, movies etc.). Knowing the sentiment of messages (e.g. whether they are positive or negative) can be extremely valuable to the people or organisations involved, especially when monitoring trends over time.

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic.

The rise of social media such as blogs and social networks has fuelled interest in sentiment analysis. With the proliferation of reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency for businesses looking to market their products, identify new opportunities and manage their reputations.

Find out more about sentiment analysis on Wikipedia

This kind of work is well suited to Mobenzi agents

Sentiment analysis seemed like a very appropriate type of task for processing by Mobenzi agents on their phones as tweets are very short (only 140 characters). We also felt that there would be a demand for an efficient human sentiment rating service since computer algorithms face many difficulties in trying to understand the tone of human messages.

Twitter includes a lot of slang, humour, Textese and other informal language that makes automated analysis especially difficult. In a multi-cultural country like South Africa, many tweets also combine words from a variety of local languages which would make analysis very challenging to a computer.

Example Tweets that reference take-out brands

These were some of the messages included in our sample set of data from Twitter.

"Damn you debonairs" in this context is meant in jest and is not negative.

The sentiment is not obvious in this message.

The tone in this tweet changes totally at the end of the message.

The results were ‘positive’

The focus of this study was to assess issues relating to the completion of tasks. We only looked at a small sample of tweets, and could have been a lot more scientific in our approach, so the sentiment results themselves should not be taken too seriously.

There were six participants (including myself) and we each stepped through the analysis of Twitter messages that mentioned KFC, Nandos, Debonairs or McDonalds. Each task took only a few seconds to complete and the team found the work interesting and engaging. None of the participants (except myself) use Twitter themselves, but they were all very familiar with the concept and frequently use Mxit which is similar in some aspects.

One of the measurements we look at to gauge the accuracy of results, is the agreement between different participants for the same task. All six participants rated the sentiment of each tweet, so we were able to look at where our answers differed. It was very encouraging to see that most answers had 100% agreement (Especially if we exclude where participants stated that they were unsure of the sentiment). There are only a few cases where we disagreed on whether a particular tweet was positive or negative. In these cases, the majority was correct and in some cases the disagreement actually helped to balance the rating where the sentiment was ambiguous.

The summary across all brands came out at 48% positive, 35% negative and 17% neutral or unclear. Of the negative tweets, 29% were service related, 16% to do with taste, 9% health related and the rest for other reasons.

These charts show the summary of the sentiment analysis for all four brands.

In the following results, we excluded tweets that were either neutral or unclear with regard to sentiment. Out of the four brands, Nandos was clearly the favourite with 80% of tweets being rated as positive.

Breakdown of Positive versus Negative sentiment for each brand

To have a look at what people are saying right now about these brands, simply go to www.twitter.com and search for #Nandos, Debonairs, #KFC or #Mcdonalds.

Interestingly, a quick analysis of these keywords on Tweetsentiments.com (A service that attempts to automate the analysis of tweets) returns fairly similar results in terms of rank, but with some significant variations in the actual sentiment rating. Nandos: 68% positive, Debonairs 59% positive, Mcdonalds 56% positive and KFC 52% positive. The ranking of the brands is the same as our result, except that Mcdonalds moved in front of KFC with the automated analysis. This may have to do with the fact that we only looked at tweets in English and other South African dialects. Perhaps English speaking people are the least positive about Mcdonalds? Looking at some of the tweets in their data sets, I would trust our result over the automated one. Try the service out yourself at  http://tweetsentiments.com/analyze

It is no coincidence that we ended up having Nandos and Debonairs for lunch.