VADER Vs. TextBlob — Which One Is Better For Social Media Sentiment Analysis?

How tight do you think the battle is going to be? 5 minutes to find out!

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Introduction

Social media platforms have been for several years the playground of industries in order to assess their customers’ level of satisfaction. One of the obvious goals is to minimize the rate of churn and acquire new clients. Such activity could be performed through sentiment analysis. The more precise the sentiment analysis, the better.

This article aims to compare TextBlob and VADER for social media sentiment analysis tasks.

Get Started with TextBlob & VADER

This section aims to provide the reader with a better understanding of these libraries through some hands-on activities.

VADER

It stands for Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner. VADER is a lexicon and simple rule-based model for sentiment analysis. It can efficiently handle vocabularies, abbreviations, capitalizations, repeated punctuations, emoticons (😢 , 😃 , 😭 , etc.), etc., and is usually adopted on social media platforms for expressing one’s sentiment.