Towards Sentiment Analysis For Mobile Devices

The increasing use of smartphones to access social media platforms opens a new wave of applications that explore sentiment analysis in the mobile environment. However, there are various existing sentiment analysis methods and it is unclear which of them are deployable in the mobile environment. This paper provides the first of a kind study in which we compare the performance of 17 sentence-level sentiment analysis methods in the mobile environment. To do that, we adapted these sentence-level methods to run on Android OS and then we measure their performance in terms of memory usage, CPU usage, and battery consumption. Our findings unveil sentence-level methods that require almost no adaptations and run relatively fast as well as methods that could not be deployed due to excessive use of memory. We hope our effort provides a guide to developers and researchers interested in exploring sentiment analysis as part of a mobile application and can help new applications to be executed without the dependency of a server-side API.