2016 Olympic Games on Twitter: Sentiment Analysis of Sports Fans Tweets using Big Data Framework

Big data analytics is one of the most important subjects in computer science. Today, due to the increasing expansion of Web technology, a large amount of data is available to researchers. Extracting information from these data is one of the requirements for many organizations and business centers. In recent years, the massive amount of Twitter's social networking data has become a platform for data mining research to discover facts, trends, events, and even predictions of some incidents. In this paper, a new framework for clustering and extraction of information is presented to analyze the sentiments from the big data. The proposed method is based on the keywords and the polarity determination which employs seven emotional signal groups. The dataset used is 2077610 tweets in both English and Persian. We utilize the Hive tool in the Hadoop environment to cluster the data, and the Wordnet and SentiWordnet 3.0 tools to analyze the sentiments of fans of Iranian athletes. The results of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic events in a one-month period show a high degree of precision and recall of this approach compared to other keyword-based methods for sentiment analysis. Moreover, utilizing the big data processing tools such as Hive and Pig shows that these tools have a shorter response time than the traditional data processing methods for pre-processing, classifications and sentiment analysis of collected tweets.