Opinion mining for national security: techniques, domain applications, challenges and research opportunities

Background Opinion mining, or sentiment analysis, is a field in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It extracts people’s thoughts, including assessments, attitudes, and emotions toward individuals, topics, and events. The task is technically challenging but incredibly useful. With the explosive growth of the digital platform in cyberspace, such as blogs and social networks, individuals and organisations are increasingly utilising public opinion for their decision-making. In recent years, significant research concerning mining people’s sentiments based on text in cyberspace using opinion mining has been explored. Researchers have applied numerous opinions mining techniques, including machine learning and lexicon-based approach to analyse and classify people’s sentiments based on a text and discuss the existing gap. Thus, it creates a research opportunity for other researchers to investigate and propose improved methods and new domain applications to fill the gap. Methods In this paper, a structured literature review has been done by considering 122 articles to examine all relevant research accomplished in the field of opinion mining application and the suggested Kansei approach to solve the challenges that occur in mining sentiments based on text in cyberspace. Five different platforms database were systematically searched between 2015 and 2021: ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IEEE (Advancing Technology for Humanity), SCIENCE DIRECT, SpringerLink, and SCOPUS. Results This study analyses various techniques of opinion mining as well as the Kansei approach that will help to enhance techniques in mining people’s sentiment and emotion in cyberspace. Most of the study addressed methods including machine learning, lexicon-based approach, hybrid approach, and Kansei approach in mining the sentiment and emotion based on text. The possible societal impacts of the current opinion mining technique, including machine learning and the Kansei approach, along with major trends and challenges, are highlighted. Conclusion Various applications of opinion mining techniques in mining people’s sentiment and emotion according to the objective of the research, used method, dataset, summarized in this study. This study serves as a theoretical analysis of the opinion mining method complemented by the Kansei approach in classifying people’s sentiments based on text in cyberspace. Kansei approach can measure people’s impressions using artefacts based on senses including sigh