Evaluating the performance of sentence level features and domain sensitive features of product reviews on supervised sentiment analysis tasks

Abstract

Abstract With the popularity of e-commerce, posting online product reviews expressing customer’s sentiment or opinion towards products has grown exponentially. Sentiment analysis is a computational method that plays an essential role in automating the extraction of subjective information i.e. customer’s sentiment or opinion from online product reviews. Two approaches commonly used in Sentiment analysis tasks are supervised approaches and lexicon-based approaches. In supervised approaches, Sentiment analysis is seen as a text classification task. The result depends not only on the robustness of the machine learning algorithm but also on the utilized features. Bag-of-word is a common utilized features. As a statistical feature, bag-of-word does not take into account semantic of words. Previous research has indicated the potential of semantic in supervised SA task. To augment the result of sentiment analysis, this paper proposes a method to extract text features named sentence level features (SLF) and domain sensitive features (DSF) which take into account semantic of words in both sentence level and domain level of product reviews. A word sense disambiguation based method was adapted to extract SLF. For every similarity employed in generating SLF, the SentiCircle-based method was enhanced to generate DSF. Results of the experiments indicated that our proposed semantic features i.e. SLF and SLF + DSF favorably increase the performance of supervised sentiment analysis on product reviews.