Evaluating the Usefulness of Sentiment Information for Focused Crawlers

Despite the prevalence of sentiment-related content on the Web, there has been limited work on focused crawlers capable of effectively collecting such content. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of using sentiment-related information for enhanced focused crawling of opinion-rich web content regarding a particular topic. We also assessed the impact of using sentiment-labeled web graphs to further improve collection accuracy. Experimental results on a large test bed encompassing over half a million web pages revealed that focused crawlers utilizing sentiment information as well as sentiment-labeled web graphs are capable of gathering more holistic collections of opinion-related content regarding a particular topic. The results have important implications for business and marketing intelligence gathering efforts in the Web 2.0 era.