AI Glossary Term
What does “Sentiment Analysis” mean?
Definition
An NLP task that classifies emotional tone or opinion in text.
How Sentiment Analysis works
Example
A company classifies thousands of product reviews as positive, negative, or neutral to see which features customers like. A few reviews that use sarcasm are misread, so results are treated as a general trend.
Why it matters
It turns large volumes of opinion text into summaries. Sarcasm, mixed feelings, and cultural differences make it imperfect.
Common questions
What does it output?
Usually a label such as positive, negative, or neutral, sometimes with a score or finer emotions.
Where does it fail?
Sarcasm, slang, negation, and mixed opinions can fool it.
Is it the same as intent detection?
No. Sentiment is about feeling; intent is about what the person wants to do.