GBSVM: Sentiment Classification from Unstructured Reviews Using Ensemble Classifier

Abstract

User reviews on social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, etc. have been gaining growing interest on account of their wide usage in sentiment analysis which serves as the feedback to both public and private companies, as well as, governments. The analysis of such reviews not only plays a noteworthy role to improve the quality of such services and products but helps to devise marketing and financial strategies to increase the profit for companies and customer satisfaction. Although many analysis models have been proposed, yet, there is still room for improving the processing, classification, and analysis of user reviews which can assist managers to interpret customers feedback and elevate the quality of products. This study first evaluates the performance of a few machine learning models which are among the most widely used models and then presents a voting classifier Gradient Boosted Support Vector Machine (GBSVM) which is constituted of gradient boosting and support vector machines. The proposed model has been evaluated on two different datasets with term frequency and three variants of term frequency-inverse document frequency including uni-, bi-, and tri-gram as features. The performance is compared with other state-of-the-art techniques which prove that GBSVM outperforms these models.