KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND TWITTER SENTIMENT ANALYSIS: MINING PUBLIC OPINION AND STUDYING ITS CORRELATION WITH POPULARITY OF INDIAN MOVIES

Twitter is the world's most popular platform for self-expression. With more than 18 million registered users, India has the third highest number of accounts on Twitter. This provides a tremendous opportunity to marketers to gauge public opinion and make precise and targeted campaigns. Movies in India are increasingly taking to digital platforms to create buzz before the release of a movie. Sentiment Analysis, or Opinion Mining, can be used to gauge the reaction of people for numerous purposes by quantifying the contextual polarity of tweets in real time. While the technique is a crucial element of the Natural Language Processing domain, its use to understand the mind of consumers in India, has been limited. The study is an attempt to measure the impact of mood of Twitter users, over the period leading up to the release of a movie, on subsequent performance of the movie on the opening weekend, in India. Sentiment Analysis is performed on tweets fetched in real time to comprehend whether word of mouth disseminated in digital form, affects the popularity and hence, the performance of movies. The endeavor is to ultimately predict, with use of relevant metrics, whether a movie can succeed on the box office or not. Measuring and analyzing the mood of people can help companies gain invaluable insights about the dynamics of consumers' preferencesinstantaneously.