Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, uses natural language processing to analyze text and determine if the sentiment expressed is positive, negative, or neutral. It can analyze sentiment at various levels, from entire documents or websites down to specific sentences, aspects of entities, or keywords. Challenges include distinguishing objective from subjective text and resolving ambiguities to accurately determine the sentiment toward a particular entity, person, or topic. Metadata and contextual cues can help with disambiguation.