Machine Learning Approach to Analyze the Sentiment of Airline Passengers’ Tweets

Abstract

As one of the most extensive social networking services, Twitter has more than 300 million active users as of 2022. Among its many functions, Twitter is now one of the go-to platforms for consumers to share their opinions about products or experiences, including flight services provided by commercial airlines. Using a machine learning approach, this study aimed to measure customer satisfaction by analyzing sentiments of tweets that mention airlines. Relevant tweets were retrieved from Twitter’s application programming interface and processed through tokenization and vectorization. After that, these processed vectors were passed into a pretrained machine learning classifier to predict the sentiments. In addition to sentiment analysis, we also performed a lexical analysis on the collected tweets to model keyword frequencies, which provided meaningful context to facilitate interpretation of the sentiments. We then applied time series methods such as Bollinger Bands to detect abnormalities in the sentiment data. Using historical records from January to July 2022, our approach was proven capable of capturing sudden and significant changes in passenger sentiments through the analysis of breakout points on the Bollinger upper and lower bounds. The methodology devised for this study has the potential to be developed into an application that could help airlines, along with other customer-facing businesses, efficiently detect abrupt changes in customer sentiments and consequently take appropriate mitigatory measures.