Predicting Movie Sales from Blogger Sentiment

Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs

Volume

Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The volume of discussion about a product in weblogs has recently been shown to correlate with the product's financial performance. In this paper, we study whether applying sentiment analysis methods to weblog data results in better correlation than volume only, in the domain of movies. Our main finding is that positive sentiment is indeed a better predictor for movie success when applied to a limited context around references to the movie in weblogs, posted prior to its release.