The Sentiment of the Infosphere: A Sentiment Analysis Approach for the Big Conversation on the Net

In the Network Society the use of hashtags has become a daily routine for the participation on the Big Conversation Iorio and Ruoto (Nessun tempo, 2015). Designated by a ‘hash’ symbol (#), a hashtag is a keyword assigned to information that describes it and aides in searching. Hashtags are now central to organize information on Social Networks. Hashtags organize discussion around specific topics or events and they are becoming an integrated part of the Infosphere, the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities. The sentiment analysis of Hashtags shared on the Big Conversation can return a possible snapshot about the sentiment shared by users. Scope of this work is to present an application of sentiment analysis on the Italian hashtags of mainly social networks as part of the ‘Infosphere’. This analysis returns a semantic sentiment report about the hashtags shared by the users of the social networks, that can produce a semantic sentiment trend about users. This approach could be applied to every language simply changing the sentiment thesaurus used.