Exploiting domain knowledge to enhance opinion mining using a hybrid semantic knowledgebase-machine learning approach

With the fast growth of World Wide Web 2.0, a great number of opinions about a variety of products have been published on blogs, forums, and social networks. Online opinions play an important role in supporting consumers make decisions about purchasing products or services. In addition, customer reviews allow companies to understand the strengths and limitations of their products and services, which aids in improving their marketing campaigns. The challenge is that online opinions are predominantly expressed in natural language text, and hence opinion mining tools are required to facilitate the effective analysis of opinions from the unstructured text and to allow for qualitative information extraction. This research presents a Hybrid Semantic Knowledgebase-Machine Learning approach for mining opinions at the domain feature level and classifying the overall opinion on a multi-point scale. The proposed approach benefits from the advantages of deploying a novel Semantic Knowledgebase approach to analyse a collection of reviews at the domain feature level and produce a set of structured information that associates the expressed opinions with specific domain features. The information in the knowledgebase is further supplemented with domain-relevant facts sourced from public Semantic datasets, and the enriched semantically-tagged information is then used to infer valuable semantic information about the domain as well as the expressed opinions on the domain features by summarising the overall opinions about the domain across multiple reviews, and by averaging the overall opinions about other cinematic features. The retrieved semantic information represents a valuable resource for training a Machine Learning classifier to predict the numerical rating of each review. Experimental evaluation revealed that the proposed Hybrid Semantic Knowledgebase-Machine Learning approach improved the precision and recall of the extracted domain features, and hence proved suitable for producing an enriched dataset of semantic features that resulted in higher classification accuracy