Sentiment Analysis Using Machine Learning Techniques

Before buying a product, people usually go to various shops in the market, query about the product, cost, and warranty, and then finally buy the product based on the opinions they received on cost and quality of service. This process is time consuming and the chances of being cheated by the seller are more as there is nobody to guide as to where the buyer can get authentic product and with proper cost. But now-a-days a good number of persons depend upon the on-line market for buying their required products. This is because the information about the products is available from multiple sources; thus it is comparatively cheap and also has the facility of home delivery. Again, before going through the process of placing order for any product, customers very often refer to the comments or reviews of the present users of the product, which help them take decision about the quality of the product as well as the service provided by the seller. Similar to placing order for products, it is observed that there are quite a few specialists in the field of movies, who go though the movie and then finally give a comment about the quality of the movie, i.e., to watch the movie or not or in five-star rating. These reviews are mainly in the text format and sometimes tough to understand. Thus, these reports need to be processed appropriately to obtain some meaningful information. Classification of these reviews is one of the approaches to extract knowledge about the reviews. In this thesis, different machine learning techniques are used to classify the reviews. Simulation and experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed classification methods. It is observed that a good number of researchers have often considered two different review datasets for sentiment classification namely aclIMDb and Polarity dataset. The IMDb dataset is divided into training and testing data. Thus, training data are used for training the machine learning algorithms and testing data are used to test the data based on the training information. On the other hand, polarity dataset does not have separate data for training and testing. Thus, k-fold cross validation technique is used to classify the reviews. Four different machine learning techniques (MLTs) viz., Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are used for the classification of these movie reviews. Different performance evaluation parameters are used to evaluate the performance of the machine learning techniques. It is observed that among the above four machine learning algorithms, RF technique yields the classification result, with more accuracy. Secondly, n-gram based classification of reviews are carried out on the aclIMDb dataset..