A Cloud-based Big Data Sentiment Analysis
Application for Enterprises’ Brand Monitoring in
Social Media Streams
A. Tedeschi, Student Member, IEEE, F. Benedetto, Senior Member, IEEE,
Signal Processing for Telecommunications and Economics Lab.
University of Rome “Roma TRE”
Via Vito Volterra 62, 00146 - Rome, Italy
{antonio.tedeschi, francesco.benedetto}@uniroma3.it
Abstract— Due to the explosive diffusion of social media
streams, users can evaluate the brands’ reputation and
enterprises’ quality exploiting the information provided by new
digital marketing channels. Consequently, enterprises need to spot
and analyze a big amount of digital data in order to improve their
reputation among consumers. This work proposes a cloud-based
big data sentiment analysis application for brand monitoring and
analysis in social media streams. Enterprises can enhance their
competitiveness satisfying consumers’ needs and expectations
exploiting our tool, detecting the sentiment of a tweet and how it
influences people, when the author’s popularity is taken into
account. The obtained results, showing that branding strategies
play an even more important role in online environments, evidence
the effectiveness of our approach for enterprises’ brand
monitoring and analysis.
Index Terms— Big Data Sentiment Analysis, Brand Monitoring,
Social Media Streams, Cloud-based Applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Usually, one source for big data is user interactions on social
media platforms and mobile applications [1]. The information
shared between users are not restricted to updated status about
their private life, but also about their opinion on products and/or
news [2]. However, managing and analyzing such big data
require an amount of computational resources that are too
expensive to buy, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises
(SMEs). Such a need led to the definition of the Cloud
Computing technology. It relies on the sharing of computational
resources without forcing enterprises and users to buy the
infrastructure network. Enterprises can rent the computational
resources from the cloud provider, according to their needs [3].
Through the cloud computing technology and its service models,
the social media enterprises can easily manage users’ data,
increasing the quality of their services and reducing the data and
infrastructure networks’ management costs, exploiting the pay-
per-use model [4].
Recently, enterprises have started to recognize the benefit
derived from the use of both cloud computing technology and
social media data analyses. The user-generated contents, such as
update status and individual opinions, are becoming a useful
resource to understand what people think about a certain brand.
978-1-4673-8167-3/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
A brand is commonly associated with products and services
offered by an enterprise for a certain time interval, shaping
deeply anchored and clear images in the mind of the end
consumers [5]. Hence, through the analysis of the contents
produced by social users, enterprises can: (i) manage their brand
and (ii) create ad-hoc marketing campaigns and advertisements
analyzing users’ feelings [6]. Actually, brands are not only the
products and services portfolio of an enterprise but they also
represent an emotional differentiation in the form of orientation
and the generation of trust. Due to the lack of personal ties, the
wealth of information available on the Internet can lead to a
depersonalization of relationships and follow the decrease of
consumers’ loyalty [5]. In addition, negative examples
perpetuated in the press can increase the perceived risks of
online purchases, especially in the case of less well-known
brands. The traditional market monitoring, based on human-
efforts, has become virtually impossible. Individuals are not
more able to manually spot and analyze all information of
particular importance for global large-scale corporations. This
need led to the definition of automated market intelligence and
tools which allow the monitoring of a brand’s reputation in a
mechanized fashion. Hence, it has become possible for
enterprises to automatically identify the main and upcoming
topics of interest and to monitor the reputation of its own brands
as well as its competitors [7]. These reputation platforms are
based on the idea that consumers’ emotions are valid indicators
of their satisfaction about the brand and can also be used as the
basis for customers’ second buying. Through these new
investigation methods, online businesses should pay more
attention to reinforcing the refinement of the brand value and
experience design, thus improving customer value [8].
Addressing some of these issues, we propose an innovative
big data sentiment analysis application for brand monitoring in
social media streams, named Social Brand Monitoring (SBM).
Currently, the SBM prototype is based on a Client-Server
architecture developed in Java. Moreover, Twitter is the target
social media and through the services provided by SBM tool an
enterprise can monitor its brand and image as well as its
competitor analyzing the user-generated data.
 The remainder of this work is organized as follows. Section
2 depicts the most important related works, while Section 3
introduces the SBM tool system model, the client-server
architecture, and the big data processing algorithm. Section 4
depicts the results obtained through our monitoring tool, while
our conclusions are briefly summarized in Section 5.
II. RELATED WORKS
Understanding ‘what other people think’ has always been a
key concept during the decision-making process [9]. Sentiment
analysis and opinion mining have become two important fields
of Artificial Intelligence. Through sentiment analysis, it is
possible to establish the sentiment associated to social media
users in a mechanized and automated fashion. Recognizing the
benefit deriving from them, several enterprises have developed
their own sentiment analysis monitoring tool in order to keep
record of their brand reputation respectively. The brand
monitoring activities over social media and web platforms have
become more and more important. The monitoring tools are
typically based on different sentiment analysis approaches,
which compute the sentiment behind the users’ opinions and
sentences. As depicted in [10], several techniques are proposed
in literature, which can be classified in three main approaches:
supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and knowledge-
based approach. Usually, the supervised learning is based on
machine learning approaches, while unsupervised learning is
based on the sentiment orientation of specific sentences within
the source document. For this approach, it is not required a prior
training in order to label data. The knowledge-based approach,
namely also lexicon or text based approach, is a well-known and
diffused strand of literature for detecting the sentiment related to
a text, such as a blog post or a tweet of a Twitter user. This
approach is based on lexical resources, such as ontological
dictionaries, where each word can have a score that identifies the
strength of the related sentiment [11]. A basic algorithm is the
evaluation of texts’ polarity using lexical resources such as
SentiWordNet [12].
Recent approaches also establish the influence of the user
who wrote the sentence expressing his opinion. By computing
and analyzing the influence of a user, it is possible to determine
who the popular users are and how they influence other users
with their words. The main approaches at the state-of-art are
designed for Twitter. The basic techniques used to compute the
user’s popularity exploit both user’s features, such as followers
and following count, and the features of the user’s tweet like
retweet count [13].
A list of both commercial and academic examples of brand
monitoring tools is provided in [14]. The authors analyze the
state of art of companies and university researches on sentiment
analysis tools and systems designed for business marketing,
such as Brandwatch [15], Synthesio [16], and SproutSocial [17].
These social media monitoring tools allow finding insights into
a brands’ visibility on social networks, search and stream social
media data using some criteria such as keyword or languages.
These tools also provide useful functions to analyze the data and
understand people feelings and opinions. However, these
services and tools are expensive and the stakeholder, which pays
for these services, cannot directly access to the social media
data, because the data analysis is realized outside the company.
Moreover, a large number of tools do not allow streaming from
social media or are not online tools. Another web-based tool for
social media data analysis is proposed in [18]. Here, the authors
developed the SWAB (Social Web Analysis Buddy) tool,
integrating both data quality analysis and large-scale data
mining techniques. They propose a Client-Server architecture,
where the client manages users’ input while the server manages
several tasks such as the crawling of Twitter’s data and the
processing of the retrieved data in order to establish the related
sentiments. Finally, the authors used a Naïve Bayes
classification model in order to compute the sentiments of user-
generated content.
Figure 1. The SBM tool system model
III. CLOUD-BASED BIG DATA SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
A. System Model
The SMB tool adopts the PaaS model, provided by Microsoft
Windows Azure, and respects the main software quality
requirement, such as scalability and fault tolerance, for this kind
of distributed services. As shown in Fig. 1, the prototype is based
on three main entities: (i) the target social media represented by
Twitter, which allows us to gather the contents to analyze; (ii)
the client which is a user-friendly website; (iii) the server
released on Windows Azure Platform. We choose Twitter as
target social media because of its features and characteristics.
Thanks to its microblogging nature and features, Twitter has
evolved into an actual news media allowing users to easily
discover what is happening at any moment in time in the world.
Its evolution stems from the fact that Twitter not only provides
a virtual space used as a new communication channel but it also
stores any kind of news generated by its users networks in real-
time. Twitter’s users exploit the provided communication
channels in order to express and share their opinions and
sentiments not only with friends but also with strangers. The
SBM’s server provides several services through the defined
Web Service RESTful and the Windows Azure platform. For
instance, the server allows SBM’s users to start a new search
sending a specific query to the server, which starts a crawling
session and stores all the retrieved data in a shared database.
Through the provided services, a user can query the SBM client
in order to know the overall sentiments about a certain brand for
a specific date and/or time interval. Finally, we developed SBM
tool involving different programming languages and
frameworks choosing, i.e., Java as the programming language
for the server side and JavaServer Page (JSP) technology for the
client side. The rest of this section is divided in two sub-sections
which describe the design of the server and client. In addition,
in the rest of this paper we use the words “author” and
“researcher” to refer to the Twitter and the SBM tool users,
respectively.
B. Server Design
In order to design a well-defined architecture for SBM tool,
we followed the principle of several design and architectural
patterns [19]. The patterns Layers and N-Tier were the main
ones used to design the architecture. Through the benefits
derived by N-Tier pattern application, it is possible to physically
separate the architecture in three tiers: (i) the presentation tier
that manages all the aspects of the user interface in order to show
the required result of an action to the end-user; (ii) the
application logic tier that is the core tier which coordinates the
application behaviors and manages the data between the two
surrounding tiers; (iii) the data management tier that includes the
data persistence mechanisms (database servers, file shares, etc.)
and the data access layer that encapsulates the persistence
mechanisms and exposes the data. The main benefits are the
possibility to independently develop and test each tier,
improving the debug phases. In order to develop a well-designed
application logic tier, we exploited the principle of the Layers
pattern. This allows us to design four layers, which manage
specific behaviors of SBM tool. The defined layers are: (i) the
web crawler layer crawls contents from Twitter; (ii) the data
access object layer manages the data stored in a relational
database; (iii) the sentiment analysis layer computes the
sentiment and the influence associated to a certain tweet of an
author; and (iv) the web-service RESTful layer manages the
researchers’ queries.
Figure 2. Entity-Relational (E-R) diagram of the database.
The web crawler layer is based on the Twitter4J library [20],
an unofficial Java library that can be used to access both contents
and services of Twitter. In order to exploit this library, it is
necessary to register the owner’s Twitter account as developer
in order to obtain the required credentials. Then, it is possible to
access Twitter’s contents and services. Moreover, it is possible
to set the ConfigurationBuilder class provided by Twitter4J with
the obtained credential in order to enable the web crawler layer
to access Twitter using the OAuth protocol.
The developed crawler allows us to crawl Twitter’s contents
using the following parameters: name of brand or product; start
date of search; end date of search. The rate limit window has
been divided into chunks of 15 minutes per endpoint, with most
individual calls allowing for 15 requests in each window. The
crawled data are then stored in a shared relational database
defined for SBM tool. This layer actually provides only the
crawling of Twitter’s contents, but it is based on an interface
which can be implemented by other classes in order to develop
new web crawlers for Facebook. After the crawling step, the
obtained data are processed and the database’s entries are
updated with the correlated statistics such as the computed
sentiment, the author’s popularity and influence of each tweet.
We designed a second layer, the Data Access Object (DAO)
layer, which allows the application to store and manage the data.
The relational database is designed starting from the analysis of
the crawled data, such as: tweets and their information (i.e.
retweets and location); author information (i.e. followers count
and nickname); and hashtag used for the researches. The result
of our analysis and design process is an Entity – Relational (E-
R) diagram of the relational database shown in Fig. 2.
Combining these E-R database with Hibernate, we have defined
a well-defined DAO layer which helps the researcher to query
the tool in order to obtain the data of interest. Hibernate is a well-
known object-relational mapping framework and through its
features it is possible to map Java classes to database tables. In
order to query the database, it is possible to use Hibernate’s
query language which is more light than other frameworks.
Finally, the proposed database is shared between all researchers.
This means that each brand or product research contributes to
insert new data which can be analyzed by other researchers.
It is well known that relational databases could be not very
efficient for Big Data management since they don’t scale well to
very large sizes. As a proof of concept of the application here
devised we have decided to work with the relational database
directly provided by Microsoft Windows Azure. However,
thanks to the efficient design of our SBM tool, it will be
extremely simple and fast change the services provided by the
DAO layer in order to migrate and manage a NoSQL database,
also in Microsoft Windows Azure. In order to give a point of
access to the tool and its functions, such as the retrieval of the
stored data, the web service RESTful layer was designed. This
layer defines a web service based on RESTful paradigm. Its
guideline allows us to define a services’ interface used by the
researcher to communicate with the SBM platform.
Finally, the last but not least layer is the sentiment analysis
(SA) layer, which is the core of our tool. This layer provides the
algorithms to compute: the sentiment associated to tweets; the
author’s popularity represented by the rank value; and the
author’s influence that indicates how the author’s words can
influence the other authors and change their opinion. The
sentiment analysis algorithm developed for SBM tool is based
on the use of the knowledge-based approach adopting
SentiWordNet as English lexical resources. Through
SentiWordNet, verb, adverbs, nouns and adjectives are grouped
into a set of cognitive synonyms, namely synsets, each one
expressing a distinct concept and having an assigned score. We
can easily compute the polarity score of a tweet as the sum of
each polarity word after their classification through the Part of
Speech (POS) tagging process. As shown in Table 1, we
consider seven polarity levels where each range of score values
is matched to a certain sentiment. The main problem of this kind
of approach is that it is not possible to directly compute the
polarity of a tweet on the retrieved tweet’s text due to several
issue such as the presence of slangs and emoticons which are not
in any ontological dictionary. Hence, it is necessary to
preprocess the text in order to improve the accuracy of the
algorithm.
TABLE 1. Polarity levels.
C. Data Processing Algorithm
The first aspect that we introduced is a check on the tweet
text in order to understand if it is cut. If so, the tweet is not taken
in consideration and deleted from the database. This phase is
necessary due to Twitter behavior on the retweeted tweet.
Following the suggestions and the approaches defined in [21]–
[24], we developed a preprocessing algorithm based on 10 steps.
After the application of the pre-processing algorithm, it is
possible to compute the polarity level associated to the
normalized text of the processed tweet. In order to do that, a
second phase is necessary: the Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging.
Through a POS tagger, it is possible to assign parts of speech to
each word. For SBM tool, we adopted the POS tagger developed
by Stanford University [25] taking into consideration only the
part of speech defined by SentiWordNet.
A key factor of our tool is the authors’ popularity, which
helps the researcher to understand how the author status and the
sentiment associated to his words can influence the opinion of
his followers’ networks about a certain topic, brand or product.
To obtain the rank value, which represents the author’s
popularity, we suggest considering the followers and following
count, the mentions and retweets of each author and his tweets.
Finally, the author’s influence is obtained multiplying the rank
value with the polarity score obtaining a new polarity level,
representing how the author’s followers perceive his words. For
instance, a popular author can write a weak negative tweet which
is perceived by others as a strong negative tweet due to author’s
rank.
Figure 3. Sentiments and influence results.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, we show the analysis’s results about a certain
brand, taken in the Technology area, as one of the best-selling
mobile phones, during the marketing campaign of its new
smartphone series.
Before evaluating the performance of the proposed
approach, we have analyzed the benefits provided by Microsoft
Windows Azure technology. The provided cloud computing
allowed us to easily deploy our solution through the PaaS service
paradigm and to dynamically set the size of the relational
database. We have deployed our method on Windows Azure
and, at the same time, on a free Java web hosting starting a new
research. As expected, the tool deployed on Windows Azure
proved to be faster than the alternate solution. This is a
consequence of the fact that Windows Azure allowed us to
streamline the processes of the crawling and sentiment analysis
computing, hence reducing the time required for such
operations. In the following, all the results are obtained by
deploying our tool with the Windows Azure technology.
Fig. 3 presents the retrieved data through three different
charts. The searches have been anonymized to meet the
requirements on disclosure and data responsibility. The two pie-
charts show the sentiment and influence for each polarity level
about the brand. As depicted by the sentiment pie chart, the
authors’ opinions are in favor of the brand with 29% of Weak
Positive tweets. Such a result is underlined also by the influence
pie chart. This chart involves the author’s popularity which
strongly changes the polarity levels. The tool shows, for
example, the change from 9.7% of Strong Positive tweets, if
only the sentiment is considered, to 31% if the authors’ influence
is also involved. Then, the line chart displays the daily trend of
each sentiment and influence level in order to understand how
certain events can modify the authors’ opinion.

Figure 4. Sentiments versus influence results.
In this case, we can study both the daily trend of the polarity
levels and the number of tweets for each day and sentiment (and
influence). Through the line chart, we can analyze not only the
number of tweets for each polarity level but also their temporal
distribution. Then, fig. 4 displays for each polarity level and each
day how the sentiment changes if the authors’ popularity is
involved. Through this chart, we can easily assess how the
sentiments can be influenced by the users’ polarity. In particular,
it is evident that the weak positive (or negative) sentiments
modify towards strong positive (or negative) levels. These
analyses confirm the positive trend of this brand and its
smartphones on Twitter. Such data indicate that the new
marketing campaign gains the favors of authors who
predominantly tweet positive opinions about the selected brand.
In addition and as mentioned before, the authors’ popularity
is one of the main aspects of Twitter. In this work, we measure
the author’s popularity through the rank value computing the
main features of an author such as followers and following
count. Through this numerical value, it is possible to assess how
the tweets of a popular author influence the opinions of his
followers’ networks. Hence, in order to test and analyze the
behavior of the rank’s values and influence algorithm, we have
generated a dataset of more than 300.000 tweets on several
brands and products tweeted by more than 200.000 authors.
Again, the obtained results are anonymized. The rank value is
computed using the features of an author and also his tweets and
retweet count as well. This means that for each author it is
possible to have different values of rank. As a consequence, we
have also monitored the variation of rank based on the number
of retweets. Hence, we have selected two authors with a high
number of different ranks. The obtained data refers to the same
brand search. The rank trend of the first examined author,
namely author 1, is shown in Figure 5. This chart shows both
the minimum rank value when the author’s tweet is not shared
by his followers, which is equal to 2.71, and the maximum rank
value of 5.62 obtained for 71227 retweets. Similarly, the trend
of rank for author 2 shows the same behavior (here not reported)
and the minimum and maximum values of rank are respectively
2.64 and 5.53 for 64993 retweets.
Figure 5. Rank values for author 1 (657 followers and 1652 following).
Through these two case studies, it is possible to assess that
the variation of the rank trend is related to the increasing of the
associated retweets. Both cases show how the retweets count is
a good index to measure the popularity and the influence of an
author among Twitter networks. Finally, this statistical analyses
on authors’ popularity underlines the usefulness of rank value
which modifies the real sentiment of a tweet towards the
maximum or minimum level of polarity, reducing the data for
the middle polarity levels.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper has introduced a cloud-based brand monitoring
tool for the twitter social media. In particular, we have designed
our tool as a cloud-based service, exploiting the benefit derived
by the Platform as a Service model of Microsoft Windows
Azure. Twitter is used as the target social network, since it is
actually a pervasive social news media, due to its features and
characteristics. Then, we have designed and developed a user-
friendly interface for our tool and several analysis functions
which allow users to understand: (i) what people feel about the
searched brand; (ii) who the influent users are; (iii) the brand’s
diffusion worldwide. The obtained results have evidenced that
our tool can be a valid asset in providing strategic and innovative
potentialities to all the small and medium enterprises, helping
them to be more efficient and effective in satisfying the
customers’ needs and expectations. Future researches will be
devoted to fully analyze new sentiment analysis algorithms, as
well as different social media streams.
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