Improving sentiment analysis using text network features within different machine learning algorithms

Abstract

Sentiment analysis poses a significant challenge due to the inherent subjectivity of natural language and the prevalence of unstandardized dialects in social networks. Regrettably, existing literature lacks a dedicated focus on network representation learning for sentiment classification. This paper addresses this gap by investigating ten machine learning algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), and Naive Bayes (NB). Our approach integrates text network analysis and sentiment analysis to propose a comprehensive solution. We begin by applying text preprocessing techniques and converting a text corpus into a text network using word co-occurrence. Subsequently, we employ network analysis techniques to extract features based on network topology and node attributes. These network-derived features serve as inputs for sentiment prediction on Yelp reviews. Through the incorporation of diverse text network features and various machine learning algorithms, we achieve significant enhancements in sentiment classification performance. Our evaluation demonstrates an improved area under curve (AUC) of 83% on the Yelp reviews corpus, underscoring the efficacy of integrating network features to enhance sentiment classifiers. This research underscores the critical role of network representation and its potential impact on sentiment analysis, highlighting the prospect of harnessing network features for sentiment classification tasks.