Technical Sentiment Analysis. Measuring Advantages and Drawbacks of New Products Using Social Media

The paper contributes to the literature on sentiment analysis by introducing a new knowledge-based lexicon. The lexicon, based on fundamental research and systematic practice in Engineering Design, describes the Advantages or Drawbacks (Disadvantages) of products as an effect of the interaction between artifacts and users. The paper extracts data from Twitter that report consumer conversations after the launch of new products in the videogame industry. It compares the results of a traditional sentiment analysis with the results filtered using the lexicon. We observe a drop in the number of positive tweets but a sharp increase in the informativeness of consumers’ opinions. Comments filtered using the lexicon offer a much more useful basis for understanding customers and designing new products. The paper develops several areas of potential applicability of the methodology.