A Domain-Independent Classification Model for Sentiment Analysis Using Neural Models

Abstract

Most people nowadays depend on the Web as a primary source of information. Statistical studies show that young people obtain information mainly from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. By relying on these data, people may risk drawing the incorrect conclusions when reading the news or planning to buy a product. Therefore, systems that can detect and classify sentiments and assist users in finding the correct information on the Web is highly needed in order to prevent Web surfers from being easily deceived. This paper proposes an intensive study regarding domain-independent classification models for sentiment analysis that should be trained only once. The study consists of two phases: the first phase is based on a deep learning model which is training a neural network model once after extracting robust features and saving the model and its parameters. The second phase is based on applying the trained model on a totally new dataset, aiming at correctly classifying reviews as positive or negative. The proposed model is trained on the IMDb dataset and then tested on three different datasets: IMDb dataset, Movie Reviews dataset, and our own dataset collected from Amazon reviews that rate users’ opinions regarding Apple products. The work shows high performance using different evaluation metrics compared to the stat-of-the-art results.