Memory and data capacities double approximately every two years and, apparently, the Web is following the same rule. User-generated contents, in particular, are an ever-growing source of opinion and sentiments which are continuously spread worldwide through blogs, wikis, fora, chats and social networks. The distillation of knowledge from such sources is a key factor for applications in fields such as commerce, tourism, education and health, but the quantity and the nature of the contents they generate make it a very difficult task. Due to such challenging research problems and wide variety of practical applications, opinion mining and sentiment analysis have become very active research areas in the last decade.

Our understanding and knowledge of the problem and its solution are still limited as natural language understanding techniques are still pretty weak. Most of current research in sentiment analysis, in fact, merely relies on machine learning algorithms. Such algorithms, despite most of them being very effective, produce no human understandable results such that we know little about how and why output values are obtained. All such approaches, moreover, rely on syntactical structure of text, which is far from the way the human mind processes natural language. Next-generation opinion mining systems should employ techniques capable to better grasp the conceptual rules that govern sentiment and the clues that can convey these concepts from realization to verbalization in the human mind.