**4.2. Recommendations for further research**

Overall, the tools available to conduct sentiment analysis on social media sites including Twitter are readily available, but had limitations when used in a Jamaican context. The results received were incorrect at times, which could be as a result of RStudio's inability to understand the Jamaican dialect (patois) that was used in some of the tweets and even the use of sarcasm in some of the tweets presented.

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To improve the classification of tweets, in terms of classifying tweets into polarity and emotion, a dictionary of Jamaican words and expressions could be created and then included in the RStudio application. Through the use of this dictionary, in addition to the dictionary already included in RStudio, classification will be improved and misclassification will be deterred when sentiment analysis is used in the Jamaican context.

## **4.3. Summary**

Results indicate that the opinions of Jamaicans on Twitter varied and that many Jamaicans shared the sentiments of others, evidenced by the number of retweets discovered. Among three classification algorithms used, J48 received highest accuracy for the four topics tested and maintained the lowest error rate. The accuracy was just over 70% and the mean absolute error (MAE) was less than 0.3 for the decriminalization of marijuana, Kaci Fennell's placing in the Miss Universe competition and President Obama's visit. For Riverton Landfill fire, the MAE was higher at 0.38 with a comparatively lower accuracy of 55% and precision of 61%. For the decriminalization of Marijuana 72% of the tweets analyzed were positive while for Kaci Fennell's placing in the Miss Universe event 71% of tweets analyzed were of negative sentiments. There was a marginal difference between positive and negative views obtained on the Riverton Landfill fire. Finally, 73% of the tweets collected on President Obama's visit to Jamaica showed positive sentiments, which can be interpreted that many Jamaicans were appreciative of his visit to the island.
