This document provides an overview of sentiment analysis, including key terms, motivation, challenges, and approaches. Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to extract and classify sentiment from unstructured text. It aims to understand consumer opinions, political views, and social attitudes. Challenges include determining which features to use and how to interpret sentiment given context dependence. Machine learning and lexicon-based approaches are discussed, along with specific techniques like the LingPipe and SentiWordNet classifiers.