the present application presents methods for performing topical sentiment analysis on electronically stored communications employing fusion of polarity and topicality . the present application also provides methods for utilizing shallow nlp techniques to determine the polarity of an expression . the present application also provides a method for tuning a domain - specific polarity lexicon for use in the polarity determination . the present application also provides methods for computing a numeric metric of the aggregate opinion about some topic expressed in a set of expressions .