Sentiment analysis aims to identify the orientation of opinions in text, whether positive, negative, or neutral. It draws from fields like cognitive science, natural language processing, and machine learning. Challenges include handling domain dependence, sarcasm, and implicit sentiment. Approaches include subjectivity detection using graph algorithms, sentiment lexicons like SentiWordNet that attach sentiment scores to terms, and analyzing sentiment composition from adverb-adjective combinations. Applications include review analysis and question answering. Future work includes exploring the cognitive aspects of sentiment analysis.