Sentiment analysis will play a key role in intelligent information extraction from text corpora ranging from telephone transcripts recorded surreptitiously to opinions expressed openly about consumer goods, books and films for example. In between, we have sentiments expressed covertly or overtly in order to discover the price of financial instruments, to influence a voting public or numerous other contexts. Sentiment analysis may yet turn out to be as big a challenge as machine translation, corpus-based lexicography, and information extraction were in their time. This is a truly multi-disciplinary effort which draws on and can inform research in psychology, artificial intelligence, knowledge management, human computer interaction, affective computing and has an impact on such diverse areas as film studies, homeland security, translation studies and others.
