Internet Surveillance: Consumers Opinion about Certain Products or Events

This paper approaches and tries to offer a solution to a modern day concern: relevant information retrieval and surveillance through the internet. The increasing volume of information that exists on web sites, forums or personal web pages, makes the process of searching for information that is relevant for us to become very complex and time consuming. In addition to their success, social networks like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr have more and more users with common interests, and their gathered information has an increasing volume. In such social networks starting from a topic, users can freely express their opinions, add links or relevant photos. The system that we have built uses information collected from the Internet and offers users an easier way to find out positive and negative opinions about a topic. Information is searched on web pages (we prefer blogs, forums or users comments) and on Twitter. Identifying and classifying opinions is done by identifying some emotional triggers and by calculating some valences related to the context in which they appear.