Estimating Reputation Polarity on Microblog Posts

•We find that reputation polarity of a post is different from sentiment.•We model reputation polarity using feature classes from communication theory.•We introduce new features based on the replies to a post.•We propose different ways to operationalise the RepLab 2012 and 2013 tasks.

In reputation management, knowing what impact a tweet has on the reputation of a brand or company is crucial. The reputation polarity of a tweet is a measure of how the tweet influences the reputation of a brand or company. We consider the task of automatically determining the reputation polarity of a tweet. For this classification task, we propose a feature-based model based on three dimensions: the source of the tweet, the contents of the tweet and the reception of the tweet, i.e., how the tweet is being perceived. For evaluation purposes, we make use of the RepLab 2012 and 2013 datasets. We study and contrast three training scenarios. The first is independent of the entity whose reputation is being managed, the second depends on the entity at stake, but has over 90% fewer training samples per model, on average. The third is dependent on the domain of the entities. We find that reputation polarity is different from sentiment and that having less but entity-dependent training data is significantly more effective for predicting the reputation polarity of a tweet than an entity-independent training scenario. Features related to the reception of a tweet perform significantly better than most other features.