A Hybrid Framework for Sentiment Analysis Using Genetic Algorithm Based Feature Reduction

© 2019 IEEE. Due to the rapid development of Internet technologies and social media, sentiment analysis has become an important opinion mining technique. Recent research work has described the effectiveness of different sentiment classification techniques ranging from simple rule-based and lexicon-based approaches to more complex machine learning algorithms. While lexicon-based approaches have suffered from the lack of dictionaries and labeled data, machine learning approaches have fallen short in terms of accuracy. This paper proposes an integrated framework which bridges the gap between lexicon-based and machine learning approaches to achieve better accuracy and scalability. To solve the scalability issue that arises as the feature-set grows, a novel genetic algorithm (GA)-based feature reduction technique is proposed. By using this hybrid approach, we are able to reduce the feature-set size by up to 42% without compromising the accuracy. The comparison of our feature reduction technique with more widely used principal component analysis (PCA) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) based feature reduction techniques have shown up to 15.4% increased accuracy over PCA and up to 40.2% increased accuracy over LSA. Furthermore, we also evaluate our sentiment analysis framework on other metrics including precision, recall, F-measure, and feature size. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of GA-based designs, we also propose a novel cross-disciplinary area of geopolitics as a case study application for our sentiment analysis framework. The experiment results have shown to accurately measure public sentiments and views regarding various topics such as terrorism, global conflicts, and social issues. We envisage the applicability of our proposed work in various areas including security and surveillance, law-and-order, and public administration

Semi-Supervised Approach to Monitoring Clinical Depressive Symptoms in Social Media

With the rise of social media, millions of people are routinely expressing their moods, feelings, and daily struggles with mental health issues on social media platforms like Twitter. Unlike traditional observational cohort studies conducted through questionnaires and self-reported surveys, we explore the reliable detection of clinical depression from tweets obtained unobtrusively. Based on the analysis of tweets crawled from users with self-reported depressive symptoms in their Twitter profiles, we demonstrate the potential for detecting clinical depression symptoms which emulate the PHQ-9 questionnaire clinicians use today. Our study uses a semi-supervised statistical model to evaluate how the duration of these symptoms and their expression on Twitter (in terms of word usage patterns and topical preferences) align with the medical findings reported via the PHQ-9. Our proactive and automatic screening tool is able to identify clinical depressive symptoms with an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72%.Comment: 8 pages, Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conferenc