Rakuten Technology Conference 2016

The popularity and abundant, quite honestly excessive, usage of social media provides a plethora of data every day. While the majority of internet content is cute cat videos and internet memes, there is definitely valuable information hidden in these platforms. People use these social media platforms as a medium to express their emotions, whether it be joy for their Samsung Galaxy Note's new explosion feature, or the frustration around Prince William's receding hairline. These posts contain sentiment, which is data businesses can take advantage of to gauge how the audience feels about themselves or their new product. When used properly, this analysis may eventually become an important part of the decision-making process. As manually going through every single post is tedious and virtually impossible, our idea is to create a simple program that learns how to analyze sentiment. As an example, we will train it to try to understand how Twitter feels about our wonderful 2016 presidential candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.