SENTIMENT ANALYSIS IN HEALTHCARE: MOTIVES, CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES PERTAINING TO MACHINE LEARNING

Sentiment analysis has been increasingly popular in the present digital era which attempts to analyse the consumer reviews acquired from websites, blogs and social media platforms. The rich textual information contained data sources, thus understood as consumers' reviews are very important to any particular domain as businesses are able to improve themselves in several aspects. This paper focuses on empirical research on sentiment analysis or opinion mining in the healthcare domain. With the careful analysis of all the relevant techniques, the sentiment analysis has secured the leading position in making vital business decisions. It outlines crucial topics pertaining to the sentiment analysis such as the motivation for using sentiment analysis, vital sentiment analysis techniques, new opportunities produced by the analysis, the challenges, and pertinent future directions. It also discusses the relevant data mining techniques and machine learning algorithms involved in the sentiment analysis in the healthcare domain. The study concludes by discussing the main future emphasis of the sentiment analysis in-terms of processing the medical documents to have a better understanding of the medical service consumers.