Topic-Specific Stylistic Variations for Opinion Retrieval on Twitter.

Twitter has emerged as a popular platform for sharing information and expressing opinions. Twitter opinion retrieval is now recognized as a powerful tool for finding people’s attitudes on different topics. However, the vast amount of data and the informal language of tweets make opinion retrieval on Twitter very challenging. In this paper, we propose to leverage topic-specific stylistic variations to retrieve tweets that are both relevant and opinionated about a particular topic. Experimental results show that integrating topic specific textual meta-communications, such as emoticons and emphatic lengthening in a ranking function can significantly improve opinion retrieval performance on Twitter.