Despite the prevalence of sentiment-related content on the Web, there has been limited work on focused crawlers capable of effectively collecting such content. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of using sentiment-related information for enhanced focused crawling of opinion-rich web content regarding a particular topic. We also assessed the impact of using sentiment-labeled web graphs to further improve collection accuracy. Experimental results on a large test bed encompassing over half a million web pages revealed that focused crawlers utilizing sentiment information as well as sentiment-labeled web graphs are capable of gathering more holistic collections of opinion-related content regarding a particular topic. The results have important implications for business and marketing intelligence gathering efforts in the Web 2.0 era.

Fu, T., Abbasi, A., Zeng, D., and Chen, H. "Evaluating the Usefulness of Sentiment Information for Focused Crawlers," In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, St. Louis, MO, December 11-12, 2010