A Feature-Based Approach for Sentiment Quantification Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Sentiment analysis has been one of the most active research areas in the past decade due to its vast applications. Sentiment quantification, a new research problem in this field, extends sentiment analysis from individual documents to an aggregated collection of documents. Sentiment analysis has been widely researched, but sentiment quantification has drawn less attention despite offering a greater potential to enhance current business intelligence systems. In this research, to perform sentiment quantification, a framework based on feature engineering is proposed to exploit diverse feature sets such as sentiment, content, and part of speech, as well as deep features including word2vec and GloVe. Different machine learning algorithms, including conventional, ensemble learners, and deep learning approaches, have been investigated on standard datasets of SemEval2016, SemEval2017, STS-Gold, and Sanders. The empirical-based results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed feature sets in the process of sentiment quantification when applied to machine learning algorithms. The results also reveal that the ensemble-based algorithm AdaBoost outperforms other conventional machine learning algorithms using a combination of proposed feature sets. The deep learning algorithm RNN, on the other hand, shows optimal results using word embedding-based features. This research has the potential to help diverse applications of sentiment quantification, including polling, trend analysis, automatic summarization, and rumor or fake news detection.