AWS Sentiment Analysis of Web-Scraped Employee Reviews
Introduction

Hi! This post born as a means to fulfill a homework assignment on putting various AWS products to use in a practical setting. Alternatively, a simple step-by-step guide would have sufficed, but that probably would be more dreadful both to do & to read. Anyhow, when thinking of use-cases for speech recognition, translation, or comprehension, you would be forgiven to have your imagination go wild.

Indeed, using AWS translation & comprehension/sentiment analysis services on various news websites’ articles to compare sentiments came to my mind. Being more practical myself, & generally feeling the need to come up with something of more return on invested effort, I looked for something more immediately relevant to my professional circumstances:

I’m a 26 years old MSc Business Analytics Student at CEU, with an undergrad in Business Administration in Hotel Management & 5 years of experience in that field. As a relatively newbie to Data Science, Analytics & all that, 2 things constantly on my mind are a. Finding employment in the field & b. Trying to gain a level of domain/market understanding similar to what I came to know with Hotels.

Obviously, 1 project is not going to achieve either, but I think I might just be able to put my web-scraping skills to the test, and incorporate AWS Comprehend into the workflow, to build something helping me get a sense of how employers are in this field, in the sense that what employees are posting on a major employment website, Glassdoor. For purposes of this post I’ll focus on the IT sector, though obviously condensing down Data Science & Analytics to 1 sector is rather limited.

The generalized use-case is figuring out how the company is perceived by its employees. You’d be wise to say the approach below does not answer this question in itself, after all, Amazon Comprehend can ‘only’ categorize reviews by its detected sentiments, as well as to detect key phrases within each review. I will illustrate this with 1000 reviews on the 10 best-ranked Tech companies, per Glassdoor’s company ranking, having scraped their Companies’ & Reviews’ sections.
['Helmeczy Brúnó']
['R', 'AWS', 'Web Scraping', 'Amazon Comprehend', 'Glassdoor']