Introduction of Social media platforms

        Due to the advent of new technologies and communication means like social networking sites, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day and it is growing rapidly every year [2].
The existence of social media has forever changed the way society works, and how people used to communicate whether it is the sharing of an idea, the communication of news, or the availability of a product or service. Social media is now used in every part of our lives, it has also made it easier for us to express ourselves, normal people now can make their opinions known on a massive scale. Before social media, you could have an opinion, but you could only tell a few people close to you about it, and now, it is different, within a few minutes, hundreds could know about your opinion. Twitter is one of the social media platforms where users can read and write millions of opinions on a variety of topics every day [3].

        Our beliefs and perceptions of reality are largely conditioned on how others see the world whenever we need to make a decision, we often seek out the opinions of others. Before going into any further details, let’s first give a definition of opinion. Opinion is “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.” [4]. Opinions are usually describing people’s sentiments, and feelings toward a product, service, events… etc.

        The whole society especially companies, organizations, governments and ministries are now paying more attention than ever to what people think about their products, service, and decisions. They can use it to analyze people satisfaction and how they are feeling about it. Knowing people views about your interest has a big impact such as making important decisions, improving services, expanding to a wider audience, improving performance, and taking immediate actions.
The need and desire for businesses to mine the information that is related to their interest has increased, in order to gain business insight from it, and these pieces of information are too vast for a normal user to analyze, that’s why we need to use sentiment analysis.

        Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, grows out of this need. It is “the computational study of opinions, sentiments, and emotions expressed in the text.” [5].

    Therefore, Measuring and understanding the public’s sentiments and feelings could lead to a better understanding of social phenomena.

    Based on our study, we decided as a graduation project team to build a website called “Public’s Radar” that aims to analyze Saudi tweets for discovering public sentiment.