Opinion Mining - A Birds Eye View of Issues and Challenges

Opinion Mining has become important research area in e-commerce. Nowadays, people do not only navigate the web, but they also contribute contents to the Internet. Among other things, they write their thoughts and opinions in review sites, forums, social networks, and other websites. These opinions constitute a valuable resource for businesses, governments and consumers. Sentiment Analysis or Opinion Mining refers to a classification problem which deals with prediction of the polarity of words and then classifies them into positive and negative feelings with the aim of identifying attitude and opinions that are expressed in any form or language. User opinions regarding a product are generally unstructured. The emergence of various approaches and models provide a great opportunity to explore large volume of unstructured data. The objective is to give an outline of issues and approaches for mining unstructured reviews. Different application areas and challenges of mining unstructured data are also been discussed.