Abstract: Sentiment Analysis is a natural language processing task that mines opinion information from various text forms such as reviews, news, and blogs and classifies themby their polarity as positive, negative or neutral. With the rise of information being communicated via regional languages like Malayalam, comes a promising chance of mining this information. The works are very less in dialectal languages like Malayalam even though so many are there for universal languages like English. Mining sentiments in Malayalam comes with a lot of issues and challenges. As compared to English, Malayalam is a free order and morphologically rich language, which adds complexity while handling the user-generated content. This paper gives anoverview of the sentiment analysis works that has been donein the Malayalam language and challenges faced in these works.

Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Malayalam Sentiment Analysis.