datumbox sentiment r

Sentiment Analysis on Twitter with Datumbox API

Hey there!

Datumbox

After my post about sentiment analysis using the Viralheat API I found another service. Datumbox ist offering special sentiment analysis for Twitter. But this API doesn´t just offer sentiment analysis, it offers a much more detailed analysis. „The currently supported API functions are: Sentiment Analysis, Twitter Sentiment Analysis, Subjectivity Analysis, Topic Classification, Spam Detection, Adult Content Detection, Readability Assessment, Language Detection, Commercial Detection, Educational Detection, Gender Detection, Keyword Extraction, Text Extraction and Document Similarity.“

But note:
Datumbox just offers Sentiment analysis for tweets. All the other classifiers like gender or topic are build for longer texts and not for short tweets as they have too less chars. So the results for tweets can be inaccurately.

But these are very interesting features and so I wanted to test them with R.

But before we start you should take a look at the authentication tutorial and go through the steps.

The API Key

In the first step you need an API key. So go to the Datumbox website http://www.datumbox.com/ and register yourself. After you have logged in you can see your free API key here: http://www.datumbox.com/apikeys/view/

Datumbox

Ok, let´s go on with R.

Functions

The getSentiment() function

First import the needed packages for our analysis:

The getSentiment() function handles the queries we send to the API. It saves all the results we want to have like sentiment, subject, topic and gender and returns them as a list. For every request we have the same structure and the API is always requesting the API-Key and the text to be analyzed. It then returns a JSON object of the structure

So what we want to have is the “result”. We extract it with js$output$result where js is the saved JSON response.

The clean.text() function

We need this function because of the problems occurring when the tweets contain some certain characters and to remove characters like “@” and “RT”.

Let´s start

Ok now we have our functions, all packages and the API key.

In the first step we need the tweets. We do this with searchTwitter() function as usual.

In my example I used the keyword “iphone5″. Of course you can use whatever you want.

In the next steps we have to extract the text from the text and remove the characters with the clean_tweet() function. We just call these functions with:

Then we need to count our tweets and based on this information we build a data frame we will fill with the information from our analysis

Do the analysis

We come to our final step: the analysis. We call the getSentiment() with the text of every tweet and wait for the answer to save it to a list. So this can cost some time. Just replace API-KEY with your Datumbox API key.

That´s it! We saved all our parameters in a list and can take a look at our Analysis.

text sentiment subject topic gender
shit your phone man wtf all ur memories and its a freaking iphone is it in the schl or with ur teacher negative subjective Arts male
fuck iphone i want the s then o negative subjective Home & Domestic Life female
stay home saturday night vscocam iphone picarts bored saturday stay postive reoverlay negative objective Sports female
why i love the mornings sunrise pic iphone now lets get crossfit wod goingcompass fitness positive subjective Home & Domestic Life female
iphone or stick with my bbhelp positive subjective Home & Domestic Life female

You can just display your data frame in R with:

Or you can save it to a CSV File with:

 

 

Julian Hillebrand

During my time at university and learning about the basics of economics I started heavily exploring the possibilities and changes caused by digital disruptions and the process of digital transformation, whereby I focused on the importance of data and data analytics and combination with marketing and management.
My personal focus of interest lies heavily on technology, digital marketing and data analytics. I made early acquaintance with programming and digital technology and never stop being interested in following the newest innovations.

I am an open, communicative and curious person. I enjoy writing, blogging and speaking about technology.