The Impact of Sentiment in Social Network Communication

The pervasive influence of social media in shaping public discourse and informing societal and policy matters cannot be denied. Several attempts were made in order to investigate the nature/dynamics of this process, both, from social networks and sentiment analysis perspective. Few more has set a goal of combining aforementioned approaches. Contribution of this paper continues further in this direction. We will take a closer look into the network specific measures that allow to aggregate the impact of a given user. The main focus of this contribution, however, is to investigate the interaction of content with varied polarities on to the social network structure itself, and the final assessment of each user's importance. We analyzed a Twitter dataset, including various contentious socio-political topics, assessing the structure of engagement networks (including retweets, mentions, etc.) and the sentiment of the tweets. We explored multiple methods of integrating sentiment into the network, such as considering it as a weight factor for connections.