NLTK is a powerful library that allows you to work with human language data. With it you can process text for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging and parsing. Since I was taking the Datacamp course - Natural Language Processing Fundamentals in Python and was learning about NLTK I decided to use this library to create a Tweet classification script to be used on a term.

The Good

• Can deal with repeated tweets on a subject
• Once the classifier is trained the script can run the classification quickly
• It provides a good overall feeling about a subject
• It saves the searched tweets in a file so it can be used instead of querying the Twitter database again

The Not So Good

• NLTK is a bit slow - training the classifier is a bit slow and could be improved further
• The method used for the classifier needs a large amount of data to increase the accuracy of the classifier
• Due to the data used only a rating of "Good" or "Bad" is returned
• Bag of words used - the classifier is unable to categorise sarcasm and double negatives properly

How it all came to be

One of the Pybites challenges was to create a Twitter sentiment analysis to get a ratting about a subject. After the analysis is done the searched term would get a rating for Good, Bad, Neutral.

Pybites solution uses the textblob library, but since I was learning about NLTK at the time I have decided to use this library and implement my version of a classifier. Working on this exercise was extremely fun and made me learn a lot.

Info

GitHub repo: https://github.com/FabioRosado/tweetnalytic

Pybites challenge 07: https://pybit.es/codechallenge07.html

Image credits: Unsplash