ABSTRACT
From text analysis to opinion discovery “What do people think of . . . ?” is the central question of decision makers, such as politicians, administrators, company managers or researchers in the social science. As seen in several examples in Chapter 1, the Internet and the vastitude of content in social media in particular are inexhaustible sources of data containing valuable information. But even before the outburst of the World Wide Web and social media, linguists, along with statisticians and computer scientists, have adapted old techniques and developed new ones in order to extract the sentiment and the opinions from digital texts. As in every field of research, each technique has its pros and cons and, in fact, there is no “best technique” or a universal one, although it is still possible to identify reasonable and efficient techniques.
